The Fugitive Grandma Lives

Chapter 7 - The Explorer

Calvin Montebello had always been the sort of person to think very big. As a kindergartener, when Apollo, his first pet guinea pig died, his father told him that everyone dies eventually. "No," Calvin thought to himself, "I don't believe that."

That night he froze Apollo in an attempt to keep the body from decomposing. The next morning he had devised an engine from his home electronics kit, which was intended to replace Apollo's still and silent heart. When his father whisked the guinea pig's corpse to a local veterinary hospital for cremation, Calvin tried to steal the body back and continue his attempts at resurrection. After that failed, he taught himself the LISP computer program and tried to develop software that would emulate Apollo's sound and movement patters. He designed a robot that could chirp and run around the cage just like his beloved pet once did. He didn't even need to feed it Swiss chard.

The next blow came when Calvin was a teenager and his father died of a sudden, massive heart attack during a cycling race. His father had been fit, brilliant, eminently successfully physician. Calvin had worshipped him. Once again, the young man was devastated. At the church funeral service, he stood at the podium for his eulogy and shocked the audience of friends and family by cursing God outright and sticking up his middle finger.

"You took him from me you cruel bastard!" the tortured young man shouted. "You took him from me and there was nothing I could do! But someday, I'll be stronger and smarter. Someday I will have the upper hand."

Over the next three decades since that funeral, Calvin's techniques had grown more sophisticated but his attitude never really changed. He believed that God had done a bad thing when he created death. And he was going to defeat it, no matter how many people told him it was impossible.

He received a scholarship to Stanford, where he excelled in undergraduate and graduate, earning multiple degrees in the half the time it took for other students. He threated to quit the post-graduate program at Stanford after an angry clash with the faculty over the premise of his doctoral thesis: his idea that the fields of biology, computer science and genetics could be harmonized to provide a cure for death.

Mortality itself, he argued, was the ultimate problem. The critical failure of human history was the inability to find a solution. He attributed this to lack of imagination and ambition. Two deficiencies that he himself was determined not to fall victim to.

Calvin was finally awarded a doctorate for his work. Then he left academia and branched out with venture capitalist partners to found LifeGen, one of the first biotech firms to develop synthetic chemical agents targeting gene mutations related to cancer.

Calvin made hundreds of millions from his stock options and used some of his wealth to found a second venture called Elegant Genomics. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Elegant participated in ground-breaking research decoding the human genome, collaborating with universities and governmental research centers in a world wide effort to unlock the secrets of DNA in pursuit of scientific progress for the benefit of mankind.

Calvin then became a special Presidential advisor to a government science project with the codename "Human Record". Human Record was an ambitious attempt to compile a database of health traits of millions of Americans, including their genetic profile, daily food and nutrition intake and medical records. Calvin became one of the program's strongest advocates, leading collaboration with a broad assortment of companies, universities and government research foundations. He was known as a visionary, who gave sweeping speeches on new advancements that would radically improve health and living standards, redefining the human condition in ways we could scarcely imagine.

Then suddenly Calvin made a series of abrupt moves that created widespread controversy. First, he began to apply for patents on hundreds of human gene elements that the Human Record had helped to discover. Critics complained he was trying to profit off of intellectual property that existed in nature and had been realized through public funding and cooperation. Calvin's companies became entangled in years of lawsuits and bad publicity.

Calvin's next misfortune was the troubled fate of a cancer therapy called Helixin. Calvin's first company LifeGen had developed it as a revolutionary breakthrough in leveraging gene therapy to halt late stage cancer. In clinical research trials, Helixin showed strong promise for stopping metastasis in breast cancer patients where other treatments proved ineffective. But after its approval for sale on the general market, follow up studies indicated only patients with a certain, rare genetic profile were responsive.  Things came to a head after a criminal exploits of the "fugitive grandma" Stella Valentine, made national headlines for robbing a national retail chain to get a hold of the expensive medicine.

Calvin had gradually reduced his active role in his LifeGen and Elegant. He had also ended in participation in the Human Record project, as his government contacts grew increasingly worried about the backlash if his advisory role became publicly known. Calvin was now focusing his efforts on a third company called Nutravision, a venture that was privately-held and highly secretive. Calvin wouldn't offer any details, other than the company was "developing products based on the relationship between genetics, food and medicine" according to his statements in the press. Better to be vague and not overhype his latest venture. He had full confidence that the third time would be the charm. This final company would solve the problem he had been focused on ever since Apollo died in his guinea pig cage forty years ago.

"How is your search coming?" Calvin asked his security chief as they stood on the deck of his Santa Cruz home.

Tim Schlesinger frowned.

"She was part of the one of your clinical trials at Helixin. You didn't tell me that."

"I knew you'd find it soon enough. We kept it out of the press. Her participation in the trial was confidential and there was no reason to make it public."

"You had thousands of patients in LifeGen trials. I still don't understand what is so special about her."

"Helixin saved her. I want to know why it saved her. No one else ever responded as successfully as she did. That's why the insurers don't want to cover it. That's why we had to pull it from the market."

"So what's this got to do with her?"

"Maybe we had it wrong all along, Tim. We thought we had this star drug. Maybe our patient was the star."

"Your star patient is a fugitive wanted by the authorities for seven armed robberies."

"I wouldn't have taken you for such a snowflake, Tim, a man with all those renditions under your belt."

"I didn't say I wouldn't find her."

"You have plenty of leads. There's that local police detective who was fired after she let them escape. You could start with her."

"It's not the leads I am worried about. I just want to understand why she is so important to you. You're saying she was more important than your medicine. How can a patient be the cure?"

"I am not sure you'd understand," Calvin said, looking out the window at the sea.

"Help me understand. I always want to understand the reason for the hunt. It helps me be more effective."

Tim pointed at the ocean in the horizon.

"This view in front of us, Tim. We live in the most beautiful place on earth and yet it was almost never settled. Most of the Conquistadors never came here because there was nothing on their map. Only a few brave explorers realized it was worth looking beyond their maps."

"So you're saying this woman is some kind of Lost City of El Dorado?"

"The gold of the future isn't buried in mountains. It's inside of us. Our genes."

"You're saying this woman's genes are gold?"

"She is a truly remarkable specimen. You think the remarkable specimens in our species go down in history for their achievements? You think they all win the Olympics or the Nobel Peace Prize? Most live and die in obscurity. I suspect she comes from a long line of people who seemed dull and ordinary on the outside but were really quite remarkable."

"But it's not rational, Calvin. You're a scientist. You're supposed to be rational."

"Science isn't 100 percent rational. Sometimes you need to take a leap of faith."