Monkey Games
By Vince Coyner
Chapter 4. The Games Begin...
The Alexander Resources headquarters was in a nondescript converted Renault transmission factory not far from the Fontainebleau train station. The town was one of the most charming towns on the continent. The headquarters building’s rustic appearance belied the extraordinary research going on within its walls and walls of other Alexander Resources facilities around the world. The pharmaceutical and biotech industries were two of the most competitive industries in the world, particularly in the area of human genetic research. Although Europeans were generally opposed to genetic research when it came to genetically engineered crops, in the area of healthcare research, they were somewhat more permissive. Not that geography really mattered at the dawn of the 21st century, as biotech companies had operations that circled the globe. Alexander Research concentrated on stem cell research for the reproduction of human cells in an effort to solve the problem of organ replacement and rejection. The company had graduated from working on non-decaying blood replenishment products to skin that re-generated itself in a controlled environment. Most of the company’s research was broken down into pieces and parceled out at facilities throughout the world and exactly how the pieces fit together was known only to Albert and Alexander and a handful of doctors. The remainder of the 1,400 personnel on the company’s payroll knew a great deal about their facility’s individual pieces of the puzzle, but none knew what the big picture looked like. Alexander resources did not sell any of its drugs or patents directly. Instead it focused on research and development and struck marketing partnerships with many of the worlds largest drug marketers. The billions of dollars these partnership agreements generated provided the lubrication that kept the research machine working.
Ostensibly as a natural extension of its tissue and organ replacement programs, Alexander Resources began cloning research soon after it was established, although no one but Albert and Alex knew enough about the firm’s disparate operations to recognize that this was a primary focus of the company. When they finally became experts in the area, it was only a handful of doctors who knew what was really being done. Alexander resources had already succeeded in cloning mice and rabbits long before anyone had ever heard of Dolly the sheep. The critical difference was that Alexander Resources had no desire to publicize its activities. Alexander Cooke ruled his empire with an iron fist and the billionaire industrialist had no desire for anyone to know about his company’s cloning research.
Alex was dying. Not in the immediate sense, but in the mortal sense. Like everyone else on the planet, Alex was dying. The difference was that Alex had the resources to do something about it. He decided on his course of action as he approached his 33rd birthday, a little over 30 years ago.
By the age of 32 Alexander had become richer than any single man should be in ten lifetimes. He finally had the resources to deal with the thing that had haunted him for the last sixteen years of his life... death. Every day since the day his brother died so quickly, right in front of him, he found himself grappling with the notion of just how fragile life is. While the picture of death was not always right in front of him, its penumbra was always there. After parlaying almost a decade of currency trading into a fortune more valuable than some national treasuries, he decided to do something about his own mortality rather than just accepting it as had the billions of people who had come before him.
Alexander saw two ways of accomplishing his task of cheating death. The first entailed curing every disease on the planet and overcoming the natural laws of physiology, which make our bodies finite, despite our best efforts. This was, for all intents and purposes impossible. The second, while seemingly implausible, was not beyond the realm of possibilities. It was, in one word, cloning.
A discovery in the jungles of Bolivia allowed Alexander to leapfrog over decades of research to succeed in cloning a mammal just five years after research had begun. In 1972 a team of anthropologists funded by Alexander Resources stumbled across the remains of a long uninhabited camp while they were traveling through the Amazon River basin in northeastern Bolivia. They had spent six months looking for the camp. After literally stumbling across the foundation of the camp, the explorers decided that they likely had found exactly what they had been looking for. Buried under sometimes thick vegetation were broken pieces of microscope mirrors, glass panes and test tubes. The next day one of Alexander’s researchers discovered the only thing of value that was left. It was a steel box in which they found notes describing years of experiments by the scientists who had established the camp. The experiments were not typical rain forest observations and the scientists who conducted them were not a random collection of biologists. Rather, the experiments were conducted beyond the watchful eye of the world around them, both because of their nature and because of who was doing them. The experiments dealt with cloning and the scientists were escaped Nazis. The six of them had escaped from Liepzig in late 1944 when it became apparent that Thousand Year Reich would be lucky to survive another hundred days. While their research during the war had been solely confined to the molecular analysis of cells, each knew that they would be painted with the same brush that so accurately portrayed their colleagues as monsters. Although none of the six had ever done experiments on people or even analyzed the data from such experiments, they knew they could not escape the coming wrath. Together they traveled to Austria and then to San Paulo. From there they migrated to the appropriately named Magdalena, a village named after Mary Magdalen, the patron saint of redemption. In Magdalena there was little interest in their work. While occasionally one or two of the scientists would travel into town for food and basic supplies, they never caused any trouble and it was not long before they were simply ignored, which was exactly what they were hoping for.
None of them would ever return to Germany. Stories of Nazi’s escaping a disintegrating war machine and heading to South America were everywhere one might care to have looked. With a panoply of cities built with a European flair, the Germans often felt very comfortable there. Over time, with the capture of Eichmann in Buenos Aires in1961 and sightings of Mengele, the Angel of Death, throughout the sixties and seventies in Argentina and Paraguay, it became clear that the stories were more fact than fiction. Rumors of such a camp’s existence had circulated for a decade but no one had ever seen it. For years the scientists researched molecular biology, hoping that someday they would be able to emerge from the shadows with a gift that would cause the world to look beyond the darkness they had been part of. They knew that none of them had done the kinds of experiments that the world found so heinous, but none of them wanted to risk the chance of not being believed. They felt that if they could emerge with some landmark breakthrough they would have a better chance of putting up a credible defense. Reproduction of organs for transplant was where they wanted to go. Although the first successful kidney transplant was almost a decade away and the first heart transplant more than twenty years away, their previous work told them that rejection would always be a concern. They were certain that if there was a way to manufacture organs using the genetic material of person in need, the slow journey towards successful transplants could be transformed by a bounding leap. With that leap in hand they expected to be able to rejoin the world and deflect any possible backlash that might be headed their way.
Actual cloning with embryos that grew independently of their parents had been going on in organisms such as urchins and slugs for decades, and data on this research was covered in a variety of research publications. Building on this published experimental data as well as their previous research of splitting cells, the group began transplanting fertilized embryos from a donor to a caretaker in increasingly more complex organisms. What made their experiments unique was their ability to split cells. Given their lack of access to sophisticated manufacturing processes and lacking sufficient funds to purchase the expensive equipment required, they were forced to improvise. It was this forced improvisation that allowed them to stumble across something no one else had thought of, using small electrical jolts to split the cells rather than a utilizing a precisely manufactured microscopic instrument. While they had been unable to clone anything, they had an idea they were close.
They would never know how close they were. Because of a mathematical miscalculation, while they were very close to successfully cloning a complex organism, they would never actually get there. It was like getting on the wrong track at a train station. You might travel in the same direction as your intended train on a parallel track for some time, but at some point the trains diverge and you end up in the wrong place. It does not matter if most of the journey is in the direction you wanted to go, the fact is that getting on the wrong train at the start would determine where you would be when the train stopped.
In early 1958 leftist rebels seeking to overthrow the government set upon the camp. Incorrectly assuming the scientists were on the government payroll, the rebels executed all six men and burned the compound to the ground.
Fifteen years later, Alexander Cooke had the steel box containing the records from their experiments. After analyzing the data for two years, Alex’s labs concluded that the scientists had no idea how close they had come to the secret of life. Late in their work they had been pursuing a course of experimentation on splitting cells that dealt with problems of structural integrity of an amoebae’s cell walls. Because of a slight error in earlier calculations, they had pursued the wrong path of discovery and could not get to where they wanted to be without going back and starting from the beginning. Unfortunately, they never knew about the mistake. Nonetheless, the value of their work could not be overestimated. Had they not made that error and instead followed the correct path, they would have most certainly been able to clone complex organisms within a decade. As Alex’s scientists had this research and a great deal more technology at their disposal, they were able to successfully clone a mouse in 1978. From there they cloned cows and monkeys. They first cloned a human being in 1982. The child’s name was Michael and he was a clone of Estaban, a young Peruvian police officer who had accompanied his wife to one of the University of Peru fertility research clinics funded by Alexander Resources. (Estaban was neither asked nor informed about his cells being used for this purpose and he never knew about Michael, who was raised by an elderly couple in Ancon, a coastal town approximately 25 miles north of Lima) No one other than those directly involved in the experiment knew the child was a clone. The birth came and went without incident. In the three years that followed Michael’s birth, Alex’s scientists studied every physical attribute the boy had and compared his data against Estaban’s. (The premise with which Estaban was convinced to visit the clinic regularly was a fictional irregular heartbeat the clinic’s doctors claimed they had discovered. It was supposed to be very rare but also very dangerous so they wanted him to come in every six months. The fact that he was paid one month’s salary for each visit didn’t hurt.) As Michael grew older, it became very clear Alexander’s doctors had succeeded. He was absolutely perfect. He was an exact replica of his Estaban.
At its 17 research facilities Alexander Resources employed some of the world’s best scientists in various fields. In some cases the facilities were pursuing research that was unique to that facility while in other cases various facilities worked in concert on particular problems. The single, universal area to which every one of Alexander’s facilities made some kind contribution was organ transplant and rejection research. In pursuit of finding a biological Rosetta Stone that would give it the ability to decipher the verities of rejection, Alexander Resources’ doctors performed pro-bono transplants all around the world.
One of the key elements to Alexander Resources success was its experiments conducted on primates. Most cutting edge work was done on primates long before it was tried on humans. This was true with cloning as well. Once Alexander resources successfully cloned primates, they then began intense transplant research. Just as Alexander had postulated they would, organs transplanted from a clone and the “original” ape worked perfectly. Rejection ceased to be an issue. The primary issue of concern was literally one of size. If the “original” ape was a fully grown 12 year old, a transplant from its clone would not work if the clone was only 6 months old because most organs such as the lungs or the heart would simply not be large or strong enough to sustain the fully grown ape. As such, the utilization of clones for organ replacement demanded a great deal of foresight. Once they had a sufficient number of cloned apes available at its disparate facilities, Alexander Resources doctors proceeded to experiment with the transplantation of literally every organ in an ape’s body as well as various parts of the nervous system. Each facility would have a focus, either a section of the body such as the abdomen or spinal cord or a process, i.e. reconnecting nerve endings. The data from the experiments on the cloned simians was compared with data from human transplant patients whose organs came from traditional donors. In every equivalent case the simian transplants were far more successfully than the human transplant.
Alexander Resources collected all of the resulting data on servers located in its South Centre headquarters in Fontainebleau. Here all of the data could be pulled together to create a comprehensive encyclopedia of transplant data. By comparing the human and simian transplant data, Alexander Resources created a roadmap for human cloning transplants that Alexander was certain could somehow lead to immortality.
The data, however, was not for everyone’s consumption. Alexander was a master of furtiveness and maintained intellectual firewalls between his facilities. Although different facilities might be working on different parts of the same project, they shared data only to the extent that it was provided by South Centre.
There were a total of ten people on the planet who had unencumbered access to Alexander Resources data as well as a true understanding of the goal of its founder. Beyond Alexander and Albert the ten included six neurologists and two research analysts. Together these eight were referred by its members as the “Group of Eight” a tongue in cheek name that had dark suggestions of China’s contemporaneous “Gang of Four”. Alexander and Albert set the direction and goals of the research and the “Group of Eight” coordinated the various facilities work in order to achieve the desired results.
The group was founded just a few months after Alexander took possession of the records recovered from Bolivia. From the beginning Alexander Resources was a very secretive place and for those who would have direct interaction with him, Alex was a very serious man. One of the benefits of being about at the Forbes list of the World’s 100 Richest people is that you can buy a great deal of secrecy and loyalty. For the eight who would be focusing the research for his company, Alexander made it crystal clear what kind of a bargain he was interested in striking. It would involve a great deal of money and elements that they might find unpleasant. Alexander was generous with his riches, but he expected much in return, the most important element of which was loyalty.
Every person who signed on to the program knew what was on the table when they were recruited. They had to take or leave the deal and its consequences before they were even privy to the specifics of what was required. The consequences for breaking one’s word, although never explicitly stated, were understood to be very bad, and they were the glue that kept the program below the radar. There were however a number of carrots as well a stick. Upon agreement to participate, each man would be paid $3 million up front and $2 million a year for the rest of their lives. A mountain of cash, combined with a not exactly vague allusion of negative consequences for talking was enough to persuade 7 of the first 8 people Alex approached. One choose to walk away before any of the specifics were known. His name was Harold Thompson and although he was one of the United State’s premier neuroscientists, he came to that position from a very small town in upstate New York. When Alex was discussing the staggering offer with him, Harold could not help but remember the simple adages his uncle Ken used to repeat endlessly when he was growing up. “Nothing in this life is free”, Most things aren’t easy” and “The harder someone tries to get you to do something, the closer you had better look at what they are not saying.” While Harold knew that he would be set financially for life if he accepted Albert’s proposition, he knew that if the uspide was that good, the unspoken downside had to be equally bad. He simply told Alex thank you for considering him for their project but that he would have to pass. Harold walked out and never looked back. Harold was the only person who turned down the offer. The ninth person approached agreed instantly and in a period of one week Alex had assembled the greatest combination of neurosurgeons and researchers that had ever been assembled.
The six neurologists did not become full time employees of Alexander Resources. Alexander had wanted each of them to maintain their current status on staff at some of the greatest hospitals in the world. He felt that by doing so they would able to bring to Alexander Resources the collective advances achieved at those hospitals. Their efforts for Alexander Resources typically included two one-month stretches each year working at the world’s most sophisticated and secret genetic research facility. The facility was located on La Playa Arena, an island a few hundred miles off the coast of Peru that was owned by Alexander Cooke. Beyond those two one-month stretches, they often saw one another out at conventions or other events but never spoke of their involvement with Alexander Resources. The researchers did become full time employees. Each spent six months on La Playa Arena and the other six visiting various Alexander Resources facilities to follow up on different aspects of data they had provided South Centre.
Each October the ten would meet on La Playa Arena for a week to access the current status of each element of the program, discuss the critical needs and set the priorities for the next year.
At the very beginning Alexander made it very clear that no one was allowed to discuss the project’s existence or their involvement with anyone, including their families. Albert had argued with Alex that the idea of keeping such a secret amongst ten people seemed impossible. Alex retorted that as demonstrated by the lack credible conspiracy proof ten years since Kennedy was assassinated, money and fear make for a great deterrence.
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