Chapter 3
“The Swiss period, if we can call it that, started in 1973 with your arrival at the Klettendorf clinic and lasted more than forty years until you were forced to leave the country in 2017. How would you describe it, looking back?”
“We can roughly divide it into three main parts. In the first fifteen years, I was mainly focused on completing the development of Telomerax and consolidating the clinic research activity.
Then, from the late eighties to around 2010, most of my attention went into creating the network that was necessary to protect the Telomerax secret. The last years were all about fighting off the effects of information leakage that made me, my family, and my friends, subjective to of all kinds of attention from big governments, big corporations, and big crime from all over the world. This eventually endangered our security and survival.
It was a period of increasing anxiety and fear. Without a doubt, the first ten years were the best ones. The clinic had a very competent staff, and performing my duties as lab director was a satisfying job that left me plenty of time to experiment.
I had brought along with me a lot of machinery from L’Oreal and I purposely organized the research activity in a way that doctors and technicians working with me, could not get the full picture. At times, I was sending some of the experiment results to Rodney Gilmore, a research associate who I had met in Cambridge back in the sixties and who had become a professor of biochemistry.
By 1977, I had modified the Telomerax prototype so that it was now possible to employ telomerase not only in skin cells but in a number of other tissues like muscles, kidneys, the nervous system, and liver. But at the same time this information was becoming more and more public. In 1978, Elizabeth Blackburn and her Yale colleagues published the analysis about telomeres that would win them the Nobel Prize in 2009.
After reading the article I immediately called Rodney and asked him if my correspondence with him had any part of this. He thought I was angry because my work was not mentioned at all in the bibliography and that I was looking to get part of the credit, so he immediately became defensive.
“Well, Louis, you know, I did not quite understand what you were saying in your correspondence and this Australian girl we have here, at Darwin College, is really bright. I just thought she might have a look at it. She could get some insight for her own research, too. You know, I am a professor. You have your clinic, I did not think it would be a big issue if your name did not appear in the bibliography. And anyway, it was private correspondence…”
“I am not looking for any damn glory, Rodney! If I had been, I would not have left Cavendish lab back in 1962. The fact is, I am working for Dr. Klettendorf and I have sworn to secrecy since this is part of our cosmetic research. This article could end my career. Just please do me a favor and keep my name out of the references and please trash all of our correspondence. I cannot afford to put my job at risk. Is that clear, Rodney?”
“I am sorry, I did not mean to put you in trouble. Elizabeth has been working here at Cambridge since 1975. I have never seen someone as gifted as her in biochemistry so when I went through your last letter I asked her to go over your key points, especially in those paragraphs where you describe the way to synthesize the new enzyme. I simply had no idea how to build the verification experiment, so I just asked for a little advice.”
“Did you give her a copy of my paper, Rodney? This could cost me my position and more. I do not want to restart at age forty-four.”
“What the hell, Louis, of course not. I understand the difference between private letters and open research.”
“All right, then. Let’s close it here. But please tell me before sharing anything next time. I need to know what’s going on.”
Apparently I was convincing enough, because no reference to my name or research ever appeared in any official scientific journal. But just as a precaution, I stopped all scientific exchanges with Rodney and other scholars and over time, even the personal ones, slowly but surely severing all ties with my past.
In 1980, I reached the final breakthrough. The drug could now cover all human tissue and my cooperative guinea pigs would take it by applying the occasional skin cream treatment commonly used at every beauty clinic. Once Telomerax was absorbed into the skin, it slowly diffused into the rest of the body, effectively stopping the aging process.
The next step was to run extensive clinical experiments to test if there were side effects after applying the cream. This took place between 1980 and 1984. I would start taking Telomerax myself, toward the end of 1983. Only after the first round of experiments showed no major drawbacks.”
“Yet in your research journal you describe some nasty collateral effects, like the results that confirmed existing tumors develop much faster after treatment with Telomerax.”
“Indeed. Tumors are to some extent the precursors of immortality. They are made up of cells that keep replicating uncontrollably fast, without aging, making them unstoppable. In addition, they have much higher levels of telomerase. Eleven of my patients, which is roughly two percent of everyone involved in the clinical trials, already had some form of cancer which they were unaware of before being exposed to the treatment.
After leaving the clinic, their tumors developed much faster than expected, establishing a strong connection between Telomerax and cancer progress. As a result, I modified the drug so that you were required to take it regularly in small doses and then eventually I transformed it into a pill. This made it so much easier to use, without the extensive process of bathing in a tub full of cream.
Finally, allow me to comment on the expenses. My initial Telomerax prototypes costed me about $1500 per treatment, for every one of my patients. This was equivalent to what we charged for a day at the clinic, including accommodation. By 1990, I had been able to slash that cost by fifty percent. Immortality was getting cheap.”
“Don’t you feel guilty for those eleven people whose lives were actually shortened by the Telomerax experimentation?”
“Not really, honestly. There are many other things I feel more guilty about, looking at how the story unfolded. Remember, these people were all aware we were testing experimental cosmetics on them. It is true they did not know my true intentions, but it may as well have been a simple skin care treatment that could have increased their likelihood to get cancer.
On top of that, the precautions I took in developing Telomerax were much more serious than those I used for ordinary products. Of course, I do regret not having understood the connection between Telomerax and cancer before, so that I could have saved some of them….but I did not give up on my main goal, to give my patients an extended lifetime in exchange for some unpredictable and unavoidable experimental risks.”
“Then with new discoveries, came the need for further discretion.”
“Secrecy meant many things. First, I had to protect the work from my partner, Mr. Klettendorf, which was easy. He could not understand the work behind my research, and because of my responsibility, it was relatively easy to bury the costs of the Telomerax development into the overall cosmetics lab costs. Things became a bit more complicated during the clinic test phase, when Telomerax production required almost three million dollars over four years and accounted for nearly ten percent of the overall clinic costs.
Fortunately Hans was well into his eighties and his sons did not get involved with the clinic, so with just minor tweaks, I was able to keep it under the surface. Then Hans passed away in 1988 and I took over all executive and financial responsibility of the business. This basically secured me from any inside risk, because it would be impossible for anyone to spot what was really going on by just looking at the records.
The real issue was protecting the secret of the formula. On the day of the burial of Xavier, I thought about how he was right to have feared my success.
Luckily, I was living in a country that has made protecting secrets and their bearers, a national mission. My private banker came up with a strategi
c plan. I stored all of my key research documents and synthesis process in an armored safe with a coded lock. I then let my bank pick a notary, whose name they did not disclose to me, to keep the safe in custody. I then brought the code and a sealed envelope, enclosing the name of the notary to a different bank. That bank chose another notary, also unknown to me, to guard the code.
If I did not check back with the banks, by phone, on a monthly basis and in person at least twice a year, they would tell their respective notaries to recover the safe and have the codes sent in to open it. Together with the scientific documentation, there were clear instructions to send copies to all the major European newspapers and research institutions. Repeat that process ten times, and by 1987 I had ten copies of my research under the custody of ten notaries, that had the content but no easy way to access it and another ten who had the codes but no easy access to the content.
If anything bad happened to me, the result was that Telomerax would become public domain. As I did not know who the notaries were, there was no danger of anyone threatening or torturing me to reveal my secret.”
“And how about the manufacturing facility at the clinic? Could anyone interested in the secret just break into the lab, steal the pills, and find the drug formula?”
“After more than twenty years of work I knew the production process by heart and I did not need anything unordinary to run it. All that the occasional men in black might have found, would be just basic components common at any pharmaceutical lab.
Obviously, I would not have done any of this without an agreement. I was basically banking on the assumption that any organization interested in Telomerax would also have had a clear interest in keeping it a secret. So no matter how evil their intention may have seemed, we would have had this crucial goal in common. Removing me from the equation against my will meant immediate public availability to the formula.
At the time, I could only come up with a few ways how the drug could have gone public. The first, being my sudden death in a totally unexpected catastrophe like an accident, or natural disaster. Otherwise, through a failed negotiation with an unreasonable party. Or, perhaps, the chance of someone actually wanting to take it public.
In the first case scenario, I told myself it would have been fate’s desire to let all mankind share my legacy. As for the other two, I figured that this would show the presence of such extreme corruption and ignorance that mankind would desperately need this gift.
However, I did not consider the fact that showed up later on, that I would become the prime target of hatred for years after my discovery went public. Then, there was also the time factor. This secret had to be kept over a long period of time, for as long as I would live. Hanging around your neighborhood at age ninety, running a clinic looking barely forty, could get suspicious. Even if people know you are a genius in the business of cosmetics.
Because of this, I knew I had to figure out a way that allowed me to completely change identity and start a new life somewhere else, every thirty or forty years. I immediately realized that the tricky part was not so much transferring the assets and the money, but rather creating a believable story around it, to give the new Louis a real past. I would need assistance from people knowledgeable in the functions of secret services, security agencies, and organized crime. Basically, I could not do this alone. I needed to build a small and extremely trustworthy network of…let’s say, ‘immortal guardians’, whose one mission was to keep Telomerax hidden.
But, unlike biochemistry, this area was unfamiliar to me and maybe it is no surprise that despite the caution I took, and the initial success, this is the part that did not go as smoothly as I had hoped.”