See all titles by Ben Bova.Luke Abramson, a brilliant
cellular biologist who is battling lung cancer, has one joy in life, his
ten-year-old granddaughter, Angela. When he learns that Angela has an
inoperable brain tumor and is given less than six months to live,
Abramson wants to try a new enzyme, Mortality Factor 4 (MORF4), that he
believes will kill Angela’s tumor.
However, the hospital bureaucracy
won’t let him do it because MORF4 has not yet been approved by the FDA.
Knowing that Angela will die before he can get approval of the
treatment, Abramson abducts Angela from the hospital with plans to take
her to a private research laboratory in Oregon.
Luke realizes he’s too old and
decrepit to flee across the country with his sick granddaughter, chased
by the FBI. So he injects himself with a genetic factor that will
stimulate his body’s production of telomerase, an enzyme that has
successfully reversed aging in animal tests.
As the chase weaves across the
country from one research facility to another, Luke begins to grow
physically younger, stronger. He looks and feels the way he did thirty
or forty years ago. Yet his lung cancer is not abating; if anything the
tumors are growing faster.
And Angela is dying.