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.“I’ll come back to say good night, Angel.”Angela nodded and tried to smile.As he fidgeted in his room, unable to concentrate on the movie the TV was showing, Luke heard the squeaky wheels of the chambermaid’s cart, then muffled sounds from Angie’s room.Changing the bedclothes, he figured.Then the cart squeaked past in the other direction.At last Luke heard a tap on the door.Pulling it open, he saw that Angie was sleeping peacefully, as if nothing had happened.“She’s all right now,” Tamara said as he stepped into the room.The bed was freshly made.Luke wondered what his granddaughter was wearing beneath the covers.We didn’t bring that many clothes for her, he realized.Tamara wiped the back of her hand across her forehead.“I shouldn’t have let her have a hamburger.That was stupid of me.”Luke asked, “Should we feed her intravenously?”Tamara nodded.“For the time being.We can give her broth, gelatin, things that are easy to digest.”“Yeah.”Tamara saw Luke’s unfinished hamburger, still resting on the night table.“Are you going to eat that?”He shook his head.“Do you mind? I’m starving.”“Go right ahead.”Luke almost grinned at her.Slim as she is, she’s a real carnivore, he thought.Must have a high metabolic rate.“Did you have enough to eat?” she asked.“Yeah.Plenty.” He realized he was very tired.And he felt chilled, achy.“I’m going to bed now.”Tamara nodded.“It’s been a long day.”“Tomorrow will be easier.”“Hope so.”He left her chewing on his half-eaten hamburger and closed the door that connected the two rooms.Stripping quickly, he rummaged in his suitcase for the one pair of pajamas he had packed.Prison gray.Could be appropriate, he thought.Once he stretched out in bed, he still felt cold, even with two blankets over him.This isn’t going to work, he told himself.I’m too old to do this.I’m already falling apart.Then he realized, I’ll have to do something about it.In his mind’s eye he saw the mice he’d experimented on in his lab, scampering in their cages youthfully in spite of their advanced age.If it works for the mice it ought to work for me.Same genes involved.Get me to start producing telomerase the way I did when I was a teenager.The freaking fountain of youth.He fell asleep and dreamed of the day he’d met the young beauty who eventually became his wife.Lucas Theodore Abramson“YOU HAVE GOT to be the stubbornest SOB I have ever had the misfortune to attempt to educate,” his biochemistry professor once told Luke.Twenty-two-year-old Luke stood in front of the older man’s desk and bit back the reply that came to mind.“You think you’re so goddamned smart, you don’t give anybody else any credit for having any brains at all,” his professor rumbled on.“Including me.”Running a hand through his thick mane of dark hair, Luke protested, “That’s not entirely true, Prof.”The professor shook his head disapprovingly.“You’ve got to stop being so damned stubborn, Abramson.You’ll never get ahead unless you learn to get along.”Luke never learned to get along.He went his own way, often bucking his professors, department chairmen, committee heads, university executives.He succeeded because he was brilliant and saw farther and faster than those around him.Slowly, grudgingly, the scientific orthodoxy surrounding him learned to respect Luke’s abilities.Over the years they came to realize that this loner of a cellular biologist was making important strides in basic biomedical research.Decade after decade, Professor Lucas T.Abramson took graduate students into his laboratory and turned them into award-winning researchers.He won few awards himself.He didn’t need them.He wasn’t interested in them.All he wanted was to do the work he chose to do with as little interference from the outside world as possible.Stubborn, they called him.Cantankerous.But brilliant.Luke demanded very little from the establishment: just a lab to work in, a few assistants to help, and the freedom to pursue his own line of thinking.He steered clear of applied research.Despite his unspoken, bitter war with cancer, he never aimed his work specifically at oncology.Luke went deeper, probing into the fundamental cellular processes of the human body.He picked up on earlier research on the effect of telomeres on cell biology.It took years of patient, unspectacular experiments, but eventually he was able to show how to rejuvenate aged, decrepit lab mice and make them youthful again—by triggering their telomeres to regrow [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]