Хлоя Бенджамин - The Immortalists

‘And that works how?’ asks Luke.

‘We think it has to do with a gene called DAF-16, which is involved in the molecular signaling pathway initiated by the insulin receptor.’ The door opens, and out walks an animal technician in blue scrubs; Varya and Luke take her place. ‘When you block this pathway in C. elegans , for instance, you can more than double its life span.’

Luke looks at her. ‘In English?’

Rarely does Varya discuss her work with non-scientists. All the more reason to take this interview, said Annie: to bring their work to the Chronicle ’s wide audience.

‘I’ll give you an example,’ she says as the elevator door opens. ‘The people of Okinawa have the highest life expectancy in the world. I studied the Okinawan diet in graduate school and what’s clear is that while it’s very nutritious, it’s also very low in calories.’ She turns left, into a long hallway. ‘We eat food to produce energy. But energy production also creates chemicals that harm the body, because they cause cells to become stressed. Now, here’s the interesting part: when you’re on a restricted diet, like the Okinawans, you’re actually causing the system more stress. But this is what allows the body to live longer: it’s continuously dealing with a low level of stress, and this teaches it how to deal with stress in the long-term.’

‘It doesn’t sound very enjoyable.’ Luke wears a pair of technical pants with a zip-up hoodie. A pair of sunglasses is stuck in his hair, held in place by the curls.

Varya fits her key in the office door and pushes it open with her hip. ‘Hedonists don’t tend to live very long.’

‘But they have fun while they’re doing it.’ Luke follows her into the office. Her side is immaculate, while Annie’s is littered with PowerBar wrappers and water bottles and disheveled stacks of academic journals. ‘It sounds like you’re saying we can choose to live. Or we can choose to survive.’

Varya hands him a stack of facility clothing. ‘Protective gear.’

He takes the bundle in his arms and sets his backpack down. The pants are almost too short; Luke’s legs are long and thin, and without warning Varya sees Daniel’s legs, Daniel’s face. She turns away from him to steady herself. For years after his death, she had no episodes at all. But one Monday, four months ago, her coffeemaker broke, so she went to Peet’s and stood in a long line of customers. The music was hideous – a jazzy Christmas compilation, though it was barely Thanksgiving – and something about this and the crowds and the dense, suppressive smell of coffee grinding and the accompanying screech made Varya feel as though she were choking. By the time she reached the cashier, she could see that the employee’s mouth was moving but she could not hear what it said. She stared, watching the mouth as if from one end of a telescope, until it spoke more sharply – ‘ Ma’am? Are you all right? ’ – and the telescope clattered to the ground.

When she turns around, Luke is already suited up, and he is staring at her.

‘How long have you been working here?’ he asks, which is different than what she thought he would say – Are you all right? – and for this she is grateful.

‘Ten years.’

‘And before that?’

Varya crouches to slip on her shoe covers. ‘I’m sure you’ve done your research.’

‘You graduated from Vassar with your BS in 1978. By 1983 you were in graduate school at NYU, which you finished in ’88. You stayed on as a research assistant for another two years, and then you took a fellowship at Columbia. In ’93 you published a study on yeast – “Extreme life span extension in yeast mutants: age-dependent mutations increase at slower pace in organisms with CR-activated Sir2,” if I’m not mistaken – which was groundbreaking enough to be covered by some of the popular science magazines, and then the Times .’

Varya stands, surprised. The information he’s cited is available on the Drake’s website, but she had not given him so much credit as to expect he had it memorized.

‘I wanted to make sure I had my facts straight,’ Luke adds. His voice is muffled by the mask, but his eyes, as seen through the face shield, look slightly sheepish.

‘You do.’

‘So why the leap to primates?’ He holds the office door open for her, and she locks it from the outside.

She had been used to organisms so tiny they could only be properly viewed through a microscope: laboratory yeast, shipped in vacuum-sealed containers from a supply company in North Carolina, and fruit flies bred for human study, with miniature wings too small for flight. Varya was forty-four when the Drake’s CEO – then a stern older woman who warned Varya that an opportunity like this would not come her way again – invited her to run a caloric-restriction study in primates. When they hung up, Varya laughed in fear. She had enough trouble going to the doctor’s office; to spend her days in close proximity to rhesus monkeys, from which she could catch tuberculosis and herpes B, was inconceivable.

What’s more, she was baffled. She hadn’t worked with primates, or even with mice, but this, said the CEO, was the source of their interest: the Drake wanted not to promote a low-calorie lifestyle for human beings – ‘Imagine how successful that would be,’ the woman said, wryly – but to develop a drug that would have the same effect. They needed someone who was well versed in genetics, someone who could analyze their findings on a molecular level. And she was quick to assure Varya that her daily tasks would have little to do with the animals. They had technicians and a veterinarian for that. Most of Varya’s time would be spent on conference calls, in meetings, or at her desk: reading and reviewing papers, writing grants, assessing data, preparing presentations. Really, if she preferred, she could have no contact with the animals at all.

Now Varya leads Luke toward a large steel door. ‘We share about ninety-three percent of our genes with rhesus monkeys. I was more comfortable working with yeast. But I realized that what I was doing with yeast would never matter as much to human beings – could never matter as much, biologically speaking – as a study in primates.’

What she does not say is that the year 2000, when she was approached by the Drake, was almost ten years after Klara’s death and twenty after Simon’s. ‘Think about it,’ the CEO said, and Varya said she would, while calculating how much time would reasonably pass if she were to do such a thing so that she knew how long to wait before declining. But when she returned to her lab at Columbia, where she was running a new study on yeast, she felt not satisfaction or pride but worthlessness. When Varya was in graduate school, her research had been groundbreaking, but these days, any postdoc knew how to extend the life span of a fly or a worm. In five years, what would she have to show for herself? Likely no partner, certainly no children, but this, ideally: a major finding. A different sort of contribution to the world.

She took the job for another reason, too. Varya had always told herself that she did her research out of love – love for life, for science, and for her siblings, who hadn’t lived long enough to reach old age – but at heart, she worried that her primary motivation was fear. Fear that she had no control, that life slipped through one’s fingers no matter what. Fear that Simon and Klara and Daniel had, at least, lived in the world, while Varya lived in her research, in her books, in her head. The job at the Drake felt like her last chance. If she could push herself to do this, in spite of what misery it would cause her, she could chip away at her guilt, that debt her survival had engendered.