The Immortalists(86)
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.
‘Your gloves,’ she says, stopping outside the door to the vivarium. ‘Don’t take them off, either pair.’
Luke holds up his hands. His camera hangs around his neck from a strap; he’s left his notebook and tape recorder in the office. Varya opens the rubber-sealed door of Vivarium 1, another door opened only by a key code that Annie changes each month, and leads Luke into the blinding midday roar.
Vivarium, in Latin, means ‘place of life.’ In science it refers to an enclosure where living animals are kept in conditions that simulate their natural environment. What is the natural environment of the rhesus monkey? Human beings are the only primate more broadly distributed across the globe than the rhesus macaque, these nomads who have traveled across land and over water, who can live as well on a four-thousand-foot mountain as in a tropical forest or a mangrove swamp. From Puerto Rico to Afghanistan the monkey thrives, making homes of temples and canal banks and railway stations. They eat insects and leaves along with what food they can scavenge from humans: fried bread, peanuts, bananas, ice cream. Every day, they travel miles.
None of this is easy to simulate in the lab, but the Drake has tried. Because macaques are social creatures, they are caged in pairs, and each cage has the ability to open up into the next, creating a column the width of the vivarium. Enrichment activities ensure that the monkeys are stimulated: psychologically, via the puzzle feeders and mirrors as well as plastic balls and videos viewed on iPads (though recently the iPads were removed because the monkeys so frequently broke the screens) and jungle sounds played through overhead speakers. The lab is visited annually by a representative from the federal Department of Agriculture, who ensures their compliance with the Animal Welfare Act, and last year this person recommended that staff occasionally enter the vivarium wearing different clothing – hats or gloves in exciting patterns – to intrigue and entertain the animals, which they now do as well.