Prizes Read online

As the bell rang he gathered his courage, then invited her for a cup of coffee.

  “Sure,” she answered. “If you don’t mind waiting till after my orchestra rehearsal.”

  His heart leapt. “That’d be great.”

  “Okay, why not drop by the auditorium around seven-thirty,” she continued. “You might even be able to catch some of our scratchings and wheezings.”

  Raymond arrived early and sat in the back row, watching Edmundo Zimmer conduct Bach’s D Minor Double Concerto. To his surprise, Muriel had been chosen to join the Concert Mistress in playing the exquisite duet in the largo movement.

  “Actually, I came here to study English,” she explained over dinner. “But when I got into the orchestra, Edmundo completely converted me to music. He’s so charismatic—and not even bitter about his accident.”

  “What happened?” Raymond inquired. “All I could see was that his arms were kind of stiff.”

  “He was a rising young cellist in Argentina when he was in a car crash. He fell against the dashboard and paralyzed both his forearms. So now the closest he can come to being a musician is conducting our bunch of amateurs. I really admire his courage.”

  As they got to know one another, Raymond confessed that he was already mired in scientific failure; that he would never rise above his current station.

  Paradoxically, this made Muriel admire him more. For Raymond seemed to accept professional disappointment with a strength of character similar to Edmundo’s.

  They married.

  And lived unhappily ever after.

  After graduation, Muriel found a job teaching music at the Hanover Day School and continued playing with the orchestra until late in her first pregnancy.

  On July 10, 1967, Raymond da Costa became the proud father of a son, already sprouting wisps of red hair like his own. He vowed that Peter would have the advantages he himself had been denied when growing up. And pillaged the library for books on enhancing a child’s brainpower.

  Muriel was pleased that he was taking such an interest in Peter’s development—until she noticed the darker side.

  “Raymond, in heaven’s name, what is this sinister document?” she exclaimed after accidentally coming across a lab notebook containing the detailed day-by-day account of their son’s intellectual progress.

  Or, as the father saw it, the deficiencies.

  He was in no mood for explanations. “Muriel, I’m going to have the kid evaluated. I don’t think he’s living up to his potential.”

  “But he’s barely two years old,” she reprimanded him. “What on earth do you expect him to be doing—nuclear physics?”

  The severity of his reply disconcerted her. “No—but it wouldn’t be unprecedented if he could do simple arithmetic with these colored blocks. Frankly, Muriel, I’m afraid Peter’s no genius.”

  “So what? He’s still a sweet, adorable child. Do you think I would love you more if you were professor of Physics at Princeton?”

  He looked her straight in the eye and answered, “Yes.”

  Muriel felt Raymond would be less preoccupied with little Peter’s mind if they had another child.

  When she mentioned it, Ray was so enthusiastic that the next day he came home from the lab with a gift-wrapped present—an ovulation thermometer. And his lovemaking seemed to have regained its initial ardor as his enthusiasm grew for their new experiment.

  She announced her pregnancy almost immediately.

  During the months that followed, Ray was warm and caring. No effort was too great. He scoured the health food shops for vitamins, went with her to every doctor’s appointment, helped her practice her Lamaze exercises, and soothed her when she was anxious.

  On the Ides of March, 1972, she went into labor and shortly afterward brought forth a bouncing baby girl.

  A girl.

  Raymond had been unprepared for this possibility. His own idiosyncratic, unscientific expectation was that he would have only sons.

  Muriel, on the other hand, was overjoyed. She was sure that Ray would quickly be captivated by their new baby’s charm, as well as her long dark curls, and not cherish any absurd fantasies of sending her to Yale while she was still in Pampers.

  At first her instinct seemed correct. Raymond was attentive and affectionate to his bright-eyed little girl, whom they named Isabel after his mother. Muriel spent many happy hours reading to her lovely, lively daughter, who seemed fascinated by words and rather adept with them.

  At first Raymond did not seem aware that, even as she played in the garden with other toddlers whose vocabulary was limited to monosyllables, Isabel was speaking complete sentences.

  But the most astounding discovery was yet to come.

  As Muriel was cleaning up the multicolored remnants after Isabel’s third birthday, scraping ice cream off the rug and scrubbing jellied fingerprints from the wall, she overheard a tiny bell-like voice.

  “ ‘Babar is trying to read, but finds it difficult to concentrate; his thoughts are elsewhere. He tries to write, but again his thoughts wander. He is thinking of his wife and the little baby soon to be born. Will it be handsome and strong? Oh, how hard it is to wait for one’s heart’s desire!’ ”

  She had never read this story to Isabel. Clearly her daughter had simply unwrapped a gift and decided to peruse it herself.

  At first she was stunned, unsure of what to do. And though reluctant to call this amazing event to her husband’s attention, she wanted corroboration that it was not her imagination.

  She quietly slipped from the room and summoned Raymond from his study. Now both parents stood in the doorway dumbstruck, watching their pretty little girl—whose previous exposure to the alphabet had been merely watching “Sesame Street”—recite flawlessly from a book intended for adults to entertain their children.

  “How could she learn all this without us noticing?” Muriel asked, this time sharing her husband’s elation.

  Raymond did not answer. He did not know how bright his daughter was.

  But he was resolved to spare no effort to find out.

  3

  SANDY

  TIME

  SCIENCE

  COVER STORY

  The Man Who Discovered Immortality

  “The most important breakthrough of the decade in the battle against cancer”

  “When I was a kid in the Bronx, I was a classic example of the guy who got sand kicked in his face.”

  Nobody kicks sand in this man’s face anymore.

  The acknowledged leader in the brave new science of genetic engineering, Professor Sandy Raven has already made history by receiving the first federal approval for clinical trials on reversing the aging process.

  Still in his early forties, with many more productive years in front of him, Raven has paved the way not only for increased human life span, but for the potential arrest of fatal illnesses and the regeneration of tissue in wasting diseases like muscular dystrophy and, ultimately, Alzheimer’s.

  Raven has received numerous awards and is widely regarded as a likely Nobel winner—if the selectors in Stockholm don’t see his near-billionaire status as compensation enough.

  In many ways, his personality is reminiscent of Bill Gates’s, another unconventional genius-magnate (Time April 16, 1984) who, as a college dropout, founded Microsoft Corporation, the computing software giant, and is now one of the wealthiest men in the world.

  Raven’s lifestyle is fairly eccentric. Though Cal Tech, where he is a professor of Microbiology and Director of the Institute of Gerontology, provides him with sixteen thousand square feet of laboratory space on two floors of the tallest structure on campus, he prefers to work in the special building he constructed for himself on his seventeen-acre walled estate near Santa Barbara.

  Raven is fanatical about privacy. The grounds of his palatial estate are patrolled around the clock by an undisclosed number of security guards. The security measures can, in part, be attributed to the enormous commercial potential of his research, but sources
close to him—who emphasize that “nobody but his father is really close to him”—suggest that Raven has personal motives for his obsession.

  Yet, on the rare occasions he appears in public, he is affable and good-natured. With engaging self-deprecation, he describes his own somewhat inauspicious beginnings: “Like one scientific view of the creation of the world, my career began with a Big Bang.” At the age of eleven, he tried to make hydrogen and oxygen by the electrolysis of water. “Unfortunately,” he recalls with a sheepish smile, “I sort of just missed by a molecule and nearly blew up my parents’ kitchen.”

  Raven brackets this with a more traumatic explosion. Psychologists have noted that many of the most creative minds have come from affection-starved childhoods—Sir Isaac Newton, abandoned at birth, is the classic example. Raven seems to fit this paradigm. He recalls his single respite from scientific studies was “daydreaming.”

  The only child of Pauline and Sidney Raven, he had just entered Bronx High School of Science when his parents divorced. Shortly thereafter, his mother married a wealthy jeweler and relinquished custody of her young son.

  Sandy could have gone to live with his father, who had moved to Los Angeles, but he was determined to finish at Bronx Science, and he spent the rest of his childhood shuttling from one grudging relative to another.

  The elder Raven—whose name may be familiar to film buffs as the producer of the cult movie Godzilla Meets Hercules—began as manager of Loew’s Grand theater.

  Indeed, Sandy’s fondest early memories are of the Saturday afternoons father and son spent together, “munching endless boxes of popcorn” and watching Burt Lancaster dueling with brigands and Gene Kelly leaping over fire hydrants as he sang in the rain.

  In his senior year, young Sandy’s project on the transmission of genes in fruit flies won him a Westinghouse Scholarship to MIT. By the time he was studying for his doctorate, the scientific world was about to experiment on humans.

  The field of genetic engineering seemed not to have existed as a discipline when Sandy was growing up, although some of its techniques, used to breed corn and cattle, had been practiced for millennia. Now, the “new farmers” wore white coats and worked indoors.

  Spending a dozen years on the MIT faculty, Raven was able to observe pioneering research firsthand when working under Professor Gregory Morgenstern, who eventually won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for his findings on liver cancer.

  During this period Raven married Morgenstern’s daughter Judy. The union produced a girl—and a divorce. Dr. Raven is adamantly silent about both.

  At the age of thirty-two, he was offered a full professorship at Cal Tech in Pasadena, where he began to assemble a team for his new area of research—the fight against aging.

  Raven was not the first gladiator in this arena. In recent years, geneticists the world over have been making hitherto undreamed-of strides in what is arguably the greatest—and most difficult—challenge ever to face mankind.

  Unlike certain diseases that can be pinpointed to specific places on a particular chromosome, the aging process is controlled from at least a hundred different sites on the human genome—the sum total of genes in a person’s body.

  Several important discoveries served as point of departure for Raven’s own work. At the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Dr. Carl Barrett located an area that determines longevity on Chromosome One. Doctors James Smith and Olivia Pereira-Smith of Baylor have traced another to Chromosome Four.

  Raven’s first major breakthrough came when he identified a group of genes that caused degeneration in skin cells. In various trials he succeeded in reversing it, at least temporarily. But he entered a domain entirely his own when he succeeded in “immortalizing” some of the genetic components of skin rejuvenation.

  This “Ponce de Leon” discovery—a media coinage that makes the scientist cringe—has turned Sandy Raven into a kind of folk hero. The press has touted him as the creator of the ultimate Hollywood dream: a chemical that holds out the promise of eternal youth.

  Though he announced his discovery in a highly technical article in the academic journal Experimental Gerontology, his biochemical magic was quickly translated into headlines for laymen and disseminated by the wire services of the world.

  The reaction was electrifying. Calls flooded the university switchboard. Mail came to his lab literally by the sackful. Curiously, this proved a disheartening experience for Raven.

  “Instead of feeling proud, I felt guilty that I had not done enough. I mean these were not just women wanting to lose their wrinkles. Most of the messages were desperate cries from people who wrongly presumed that I was already capable of reversing any soft tissue damage. They pleaded with me to save their loved ones’ lives, and I was left with a feeling of terrible frustration and—yes—failure.”

  Both the sensitivity and humility characterize the man.

  And yet, despite Raven’s disconsolate air, he has in fact prepared the way for the development of genetic procedures to conquer many killer pathologies.

  Raven remains a reluctant hero, still quixotically determined to avoid the limelight. He wryly dismisses his new celebrity status with typical self-effacing good humor:

  “Let’s face it, I have the charisma of a soggy bagel. If I can make the cover of Time, the nerds are conquering the world.”

  Other major figures in the field have a more respectful attitude.

  “Sandy’s achievement was probably the most important breakthrough of the decade in the battle against cancer,” says his admirer and former father-in-law, Gregory Morgenstern of MIT. “It dwarfs anything I’ve ever done. He deserves all the honor and glory—and money—that I’m sure he’s going to get.”

  “Jesus, Dad. Did you see how they ended the article?” Sandy fumed.

  “Yes, sonny boy,” the older man muttered uncomfortably. “But it’s only natural for a cover story that they would trace your career and go back and speak to the people who knew you along the way. After all, Morgenstern did win the Big One. How the hell are they supposed to know the skeletons in his closet? Actually, this would have been the chance for you to tell them.”

  “What good would that have been? Besides, I somehow thought they would dig it up on their own. But I guess there are limits to what even the press can find out.”

  “Listen, it could have been worse.”

  “How?”

  “Look at it this way, kiddo. They could have mentioned Rochelle.”

  “Yeah,” Sandy acknowledged. “Thank God for that.”

  4

  ADAM

  Suddenly, at the beginning of the third week, the blood count in category two of the Stanford mice began to improve dramatically.

  At first Max and Adam kept this information from the others in case it turned out to be a false dawn. But forty-eight hours later it was certain: the animals’ systems were clear.

  The human cancer had been cured in its mouse surrogate.

  They were now as confident as any laboratory could make them that their drug would work on the patient himself. Of course, there was an element of uncertainty since they had not completed the normal cycle of FDA trials.

  But then, they had a White House concession.

  With the generosity that characterized his relationship with Adam, Max Rudolph deputized him to deliver the serum personally to Washington. For though he deferred to no man in matters of scientific knowledge and technique, he knew that sending his assistant might also be a kind of therapeutic measure.

  What had distinguished Adam from all Rudolph’s other pupils was the young man’s extraordinary sensitivity and almost-religious desire to heal. Just meeting him and looking into his compassionate gray-green eyes would immediately reassure a patient.

  “But Max,” Adam had protested, “couldn’t we send it by the same courier who brought the blood?”

  “Yes,” the older man granted. “But even the best messenger services are unable to detect an incipient toxic reactio
n in an untried drug.”

  “Then why don’t you go?”

  “I’m old and tired and I don’t want to leave Lisl,” he replied. “Tell me the truth, are you nervous about meeting such wielders of power?”

  “Frankly, yes.”

  “Well, that’s another reason to make the journey. You’ll quickly learn that they’re just like ordinary human beings.” To which he added with a mischievous smile, “Some even less so.”

  The admiral was puzzled when he stepped forward to meet Adam as he deplaned at National Airport.

  In addition to his overnight case, the lanky Harvard doctor was carrying what looked like a square lamp shade with a handle.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a surprise for the patient,” Adam answered with a tiny smile. “I think you’ll like it too.”

  “Do you have any more luggage?”

  “No, I travel light.”

  Penrose nodded, and led his Boston colleague to a limousine waiting on the tarmac.

  The two men rode in silence for several minutes before Adam glanced out the window and suddenly realized that the lights of Washington had receded and they were now in the countryside.

  “Hey,” he said, confused, “what’s going on? Are we going to Camp David or something?”

  “No,” the admiral answered, “the patient’s in Virginia.” He paused and then confided, “And it’s not the President.”

  “What? Who else has got the clout to get hold of three unapproved drugs?”

  “When I tell you, Dr. Coopersmith, you’ll realize that in this country the king-makers are more powerful than the kings. Our patient is Thomas Deely Hartnell.”

  Adam’s jaw dropped. “Otherwise known as ‘the Boss’? Former Ambassador to the Court of Saint James? Adviser to every President, right and left?”

  Penrose nodded. “And a man to whom you say no at your peril. I hope you’ll forgive the subterfuge, but I somehow sensed that Dr. Rudolph would not have extended his patriotism beyond the Oval Office.”