The Eternal World Read Online Free Page B

didn’t have anything to brag about. Its research had led to Revita, a drug that did some of what David was trying to accomplish in the lab: physical rejuvenation of the human body at the cellular level.
    Aging was a hugely complicated process. It might have looked like one long, steady decline—aches and pains, wrinkles, hair loss, memory loss, slowing reflexes, weakening muscles—but it was, in reality, a combination of multiple processes all affecting the body at once.
    The search for eternal youth—the idea of holding a person at an ideal age, perfectly balancing maturity and optimum health—had been the obsession of humanity almost since Paleolithic times. The Egyptians believed in a combination of spiritual and actual physical immortality: mummies were preserved in an effort to keep them ready for the souls of their owners on the other side. Early Chinese cultures had believed something similar, to the extent that some emperors had whole courts of followers—wives, soldiers, advisers—killed and buried along with them. Christianity promised the return of the Messiah and a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth within their lifetimes. Only when Jesus failed to show up did the idea begin to morph into the resurrection of the soul.
    Every culture had its myth or legend about eternal youth and immortality. But there were some hard-and-fast obstacles to actually pulling it off in real life.
    The easiest way to increase human lifespan, of course, was to simply stop so many people from dying. And this had been the great work of the twentieth century, with advances in sanitation, food, and vaccines. Everyone was already living longer because there were fewer things in the world killing them.
    But even with outside forces more or less controlled, there were still all the things that could go wrong inside a person. Sometimes when David looked at the body, he saw nothing but millions of little betrayals—everything from genes to major organs all on the edge of failure. Everything from heart attacks to rare diseases were hidden inside people, waiting to pop out like an obscene jack-in-the-box.
    This was the undying frustration of David’s life. Every one of the problems of aging was like that, and they all had to be cured at the same time, or any one of the solutions was useless. It wasn’t much of a miracle to be a person with perfect, unwrinkled skin if you died of a massive brain tumor at forty.
    This was why the attempt to create a single cure-all for aging never worked: there was simply too much going on for a single solution. It was like trying to bring down a whole flock of birds with one bullet.
    But Revita was fairly effective at the one bird it did target: the aging of cells.
    As cells died, they divided and replaced themselves—but after a while, it was like making copies of a copy. Errors began to pile up in the DNA. The cells became filled with junk and waste as they broke down over time.
    Revita, however, fixed that. It discouraged the buildup of transcription errors and waste products in cells. Patients who took it, over time, found their overall health improved as new cells made better copies of themselves.
    There were side effects, of course. But the demand for the drug was so high that the FDA put it on the market anyway. The baby boom generation wanted to stay young even as they were facing retirement age. Sales of Revita were incredible, despite its high price tag.
    That was why David was interviewing with them, even though he’d already gotten better offers from bigger companies. The other Big Pharma players wanted him to work on the next Viagra or the next Rogaine—something that would generate billions of dollars while dealing with one small part of the aging process.
    David wasn’t really interested in helping a bunch of old men keep their hair or their erections. He wanted to save lives. For all its hype, Conquest was the only company that had been willing to let him pursue whatever research he wanted.
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