The Colossus (15 page)

Max and Julian waited for Kevin in the hotel lobby.

A couple hours later, Kevin came to them. “It’s done,” he said.

Julian, Max, and Kevin settled themselves in a booth in the hotel coffee shop. There were a few families scattered around. No blond men. No suspicious men in baseball caps, either. Max’s stomach did somersaults.

Kevin put his palms on the table and looked at Max. “Here goes. As early as the sixties, Hiram started thinking about going into genetics. It was cutting-edge work. He had his PhD, and he had worked at a couple major pharmaceutical companies. He told me he always kept Samuel’s work in the back of his mind. Hiram knew the facts about the bacteria in the pill—that it affected thyroid activity, resulting in lowered metabolic rate and, theoretically, longer life. Then there were the unexplained symptoms like the fevers.” Kevin raised a finger. “He also knew that the bacteria was contagious, that it caused elevated blood pressure in the lab animals, and finally, that there had been unrelated symptoms in the control group monkeys of high cholesterol, heart disease, weight gain, et cetera.”

“It worried Opa because animals showing high BP almost always have something else going on,” Max said. She became thoughtful. “Papa often asked Opa to go back to the lab—to work on what he had left unfinished. But Opa made excuses. Perhaps he was afraid of what he might find.”

Kevin nodded. “Samuel should have swallowed his fears and found out what he had unknowingly unleashed.”

Max stiffened. “Unleashed!”

Kevin held up a hand. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have used that word. I’ll come to it in a second.” He licked his lips a few times and shifted in his seat, finally settling on a spot. “Hiram started working on the genetics of heart disease in the mid-eighties. Our business,” he made a wry face, “was ancient history by then. For both of us. I started Allied, which took off in a big way.”

“That failed business did a lot of damage to my father.” Max tried not to sound accusing.

“Maxine, I admit I wasn’t very honest, but I did what I had to do to keep the company afloat,” Kevin said sympathetically. “Hiram preferred to let it go under rather than cut any corners. I even offered to do all the dirty work myself, but he chose to leave. When he left, I decided to end the business. Without him, we were severely handicapped. I begged Hiram to give it another shot, but he had lost faith in me. He went on to work at a safe and uneventful job after that. When Allied started doing well, I even invited him back, but he wouldn’t give me a second chance.”

They were all quiet for a while. Her father had not dealt well with failure. He was even less patient with others’ failures and flaws. Rather than trying to forgive Kevin, to understand why he had done what he did, her father had just lost faith in the ways of the world.

If things had turned out differently, Papa might not have taken refuge in alcohol. He might have been alive today. If Berliner hadn’t pushed Opa so much, he may not have been so blindly ambitious. Perhaps, he might have escaped Germany in time to pursue a career in another country, live a normal life.

Julian asked Max if she was all right. Max nodded. She looked at him with warm affection. If he hadn’t offered to help that night after dinner, would she have called him after Lars died? Would she have been able to come this far?

A waiter arrived at their table. They ordered a large pot of tea and a plate of cashew cookies.

Kevin looked at Max. “After we parted ways, Hiram really needed validation,” he said cautiously. “When the chance to work in genetics and heart disease finally came along, he was ecstatic.”

“Papa wanted to be a cardiologist, but ended up pursuing biochemistry and genetics. He hoped to understand the heart’s mysteries and find cures.”

“Turned out that one person in his group of test subject volunteers was an 80-year-old man who had been an inmate in the Krippenwald camp around the time Samuel was there,” Kevin said. “He had diabetes, but was otherwise healthy. Hiram found out that this 80-year-old man had gotten a fever at the camp after ingesting the Indus pill. But it had been a mild one. Some of them had mild fevers, others had high fevers. Some of his friends from the camp were not healthy. They had severe heart disease, fatty liver disease, some were obese, others had cholesterol problems and diabetes.”

“Is that significant?” Max asked. “These are all different diseases.”

“True. However, they are all diseases that result in people who show a certain set of risk factors. This group of risk factors is called metabolic syndrome. A person who shows at least three of the following risk factors is said to have metabolic syndrome.” Kevin counted them off on his fingers. “A large waistline, which is related to obesity; high blood pressure, high triglyceride levels—triglycerides are a type of fat found in blood; low HDL, which is your good cholesterol; and lastly, high fasting blood sugar. The term metabolic syndrome was not coined until recently. This set of risk factors was connected to a poor lifestyle and heredity. Hiram saw no real reason to link any of this to his work. So he filed the information away, and nothing more came of it. That is, until he got a phone call from a scientist who had worked for Berliner in the forties and fifties.”

Their tea arrived. Julian poured everyone a cup. The sweet fragrance of nutmeg rose from the steaming tea.

Kevin dropped his voice. “This scientist claimed to have worked on Samuel’s research in a secret lab until the late fifties. That was around the time Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize for their DNA double helix discovery. It was a time when the world started
looking at the human body in a different light. Turns out this lab run by Peter Schultz made some disturbing discoveries about Samuel’s pill. They found diseases in lab animals that Samuel and Lars had perhaps not discovered. They also realized that the diseases were not random. They were related. They were all, as we know now, diseases under the metabolic syndrome umbrella. This meant that somehow the bacteria was causing a family of diseases. Before they could find out why, Schultz shut the lab down. He chose to bury it in order to avoid public embarrassment, rather than take responsibility. Because this former Berliner scientist had reached out to him, Hiram was interested once again in Samuel’s work. But he did nothing about it.” Kevin took a sip of his tea.

“What happened then?” Max said.

“Hiram finally plunged into Samuel’s work when a new member joined his group. A volunteer who happened to be from the Greek island of Ikaria.”

“What was special about him?” Max asked.

“Indeed,” Kevin said with a grin, “His origin was a random piece of demographic information, until Hiram discovered something strange.”

Max and Julian leaned forward.

“As part of his research, Hiram had conducted routine blood tests on all his volunteers. In these blood tests, Hiram found that the people in his test group all had memory cells showing a bacterium.”

Max frowned.

“And because of the old concentration camp inmate, and the phone call from the Berliner scientist, Hiram thought of Samuel’s pill and its bacteria,” Julian said excitedly.

“Exactly,” Kevin said. “It was an odd coincidence. Hiram studied both bacteria—the one from his volunteers and the one in the pills. He found that they were the same.”

Max held up her hand. “One second, sorry. I’m losing you. What are memory cells?”

Kevin shifted his body a few times more. “Can’t sit for too long in one place at my age. When a body gets a disease—a fever for
example—it develops antibodies and memory cells which stay in the body to deal with that disease at a later date. Lets say you get a viral fever, your body develops antibodies so you are better able to fight it if you should get it again. That is how a vaccine works as well.”

“Okay. So what did Papa do when he found that people carried memory cells of the bacteria that was the same as the one in the pill?” Max said.

“Hiram had started studying heart disease in the context of metabolic syndrome—or MetS as it is called—even before this term was officially coined. Among his volunteers were some people without MetS who turned out to not have any of this bacterium’s memory cells. And there were some who had the memory cells and mild-to-severe diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, et cetera—all diseases related to the metabolic syndrome risk factors.”

Julian looked baffled. “Does that mean the bacteria caused the MetS?”

Kevin shook his head. “The presence of the memory cells indicated only that the bacteria from the pill had invaded these people at some point in their lives. That meant that they had had the fever that Samuel had correctly associated with the bacterial invasion from the pill.”

Max said, “I still don’t understand what memory cells have to do with MetS. The bacteria doesn’t cause MetS, just the fevers, right? And so having the memory cells should mean the body can fight the fever if it occurs again. What does that have to do with MetS? I’m confused.”

Kevin smiled at her. “You hit the nail right on the head. The link between the bacteria and MetS-related diseases was the one Hiram was struggling to make, too. However, what he was finding was that people with metabolic syndrome, at least in his group of volunteers, seemed to have those specific bacterial memory cells. Many of these people hadn’t ingested the pill, remember? They had got it because of its contagious nature. There
was
a link between the bacteria and therefore the pill and Metabolic Syndrome, however tenuous it may be. And the link was what Hiram had to find. What was known, what
Samuel had discovered, was that this Indus Valley pill and its bacteria lowered metabolic rate and increased life spans on one hand, but also caused metabolic syndrome on the other.”

Max pulled out her grandfather’s diary and began flipping the pages.

“Back up to that volunteer from Ikaria.” Julian said, “Was there something special about him after all?”

“Yes!” Kevin said. “This Ikarian had the memory cells, which meant he had also been affected by the bacteria. But unlike the others, he showed absolutely no risk factors for MetS. He was very healthy. Hiram started conversations with scientists and doctors in Ikaria. He also continued speaking to the former Berliner scientist who had called him. Hiram even paid a visit to Ikaria and found, upon testing a wide sample of people, that the people from Ikaria have the memory cells of the bacteria but are somehow immune to MetS and live very long healthy lives, free of any metabolic syndrome-related diseases. The Ikarians are known for their longevity.”

“Sort of like places in Italy and Japan?” Julian said. “Inexplicable reasons why people live really long lives there.”

“Yes, although their familial structure and social habits gives them longer lives, too,” Kevin said.

“Mind over matter,” Julian said. “Ohmm…” he hummed and closed his eyes.

Kevin smiled. “In our case, though, it was much more tangible. It was genetics.”

Max was fidgeting with her hair, her other hand holding a spot in her grandfather’s diary.

“You have something you want to tell us,” Kevin said in a fatherly tone.

Max showed them Samuel’s diary. “Their guide at the dig, Abdul Chapar, gleaned from the writings that the pill was from Ikaria. The Ikarians had asked the Colossus not to take it out of the island because of the curse. And he stole it anyway. Looks like the Ikarians knew something was wrong with the pill, even then. It helped
them
live longer. But outside the island, somehow, the pill failed.”

Kevin took the diary from her. “That certainly is interesting,” he murmured. “Anyway, Hiram put on his geneticist cap, did DNA sequencing, and found something these Ikarians could never have known all those centuries ago.”

Max realized she was holding her breath. “What?” she whispered.

Kevin said, “Time for a short science lesson.” He looked at Max and Julian in turn. “DNA is the basic building block of life. All life. DNA is made up of sequences called genes. These genes carry the blueprints to build life—plants, animals, humans.”

“Right,” Max said.

“Did you know though that only about 2 percent of our own human DNA is responsible for building all the cells in our body?” Kevin said.

“I had no idea.” Julian said.

“The rest, until recently, was called junk DNA,” Kevin went on. “We now know that this ‘junk’ plays a part in human development. Scientists now call this part of our DNA, very imaginatively, non-coding DNA.

“Man has travelled to the moon and back, and yet we know little about our own bodies. Non-coding DNA contains many mysteries. Pseudogenes are one of them. These genes have lost their ability to produce cells and proteins, possibly because of mutation. In layman’s terms, they have lost their work skills. These genes, however, can actually retain function for several million years and can be reactivated into working genes. And that brings us to what Hiram found.”

“My head is spinning.” Max put her hands over her cheeks.

Kevin put a hand over hers. “Stay with me.” He went on eagerly. “Hiram discovered that one particular pseudogene sequence was missing in the Ikarian Greeks. His discovery of this is nothing short of a miracle. Talk about a needle in a haystack!” He let out a laugh. “Hiram found that all his test subjects carried the fnkL_ps pseudogene. His group was pretty diverse.” Kevin looked down and checked Hiram’s papers, “He had Caucasians, Asians, Africans.”

Kevin went on, “Hiram found, however, that the Ikarians did
not
possess this particular pseudogene. The question was this: Was the
missing gene sequence making the Ikarians somehow immune to some commonplace and yet potentially lethal afflictions?”

“And what was the answer?” Max took a sip of her tea.

“Of course, now he had to test the DNA of the people not from Ikaria to make sure he had concluded correctly. He checked the genes of his volunteers and compared those profiles to the Ikarians’.”

“And?”

“And that is when he found what he was looking for,” Kevin said. “The link!”