Free Death Benefit by Robin Cook

goggles with thick, tinted lenses, he made for an eerie figure, like the prototypical mad scientist in his lair. Pia knew that what Dr. Yamamoto had said outside was true—this truly was groundbreaking work. In the stem cell race to move from the promising hypothetical to the clinical, Rothman and Yamamoto had advanced much further than any other team in the world.
    Rothman moved the goggles to the top of his head as he came to a stop. He looked at Yamamoto. “Have they been given a short introduction?”
    “Yes, Doctor.”
    Rothman nodded. He knew he was going to have to show off his work to any number of interested biotech venture capitalists over the coming years, even though it wasn’t something he enjoyed or found easy. Yamamoto had helped him prepare a script that he’d practiced again and again with his wife. The students were to be a kind of dress rehearsal.
    “Welcome to Columbia University Organogenesis Laboratory,” Rothman said. Yamamoto coughed gently into his hand. Rothman had trouble deviating even slightly from the prepared text.
    “It is common knowledge that there are currently more than one hundred thousand people on waiting lists for organ transplants in this country, and these are people with end-stage disease. The list grows at a rate of about five hundred a month. Currently the same number of people, five hundred or so, die every month. On top of this grim statistic there are thousands upon thousands of additional patients who could benefit from an organ transplant even though they are not yet in a life-threatening situation. Obviously in the current environment the supply of viable organs from either a live donor or a recently deceased individual has not come close to keeping up with demand. Even for those patients lucky enough to receive an organ, the match is often far from optimal, meaning they are relegated to a life of immunosuppression with dire health consequences. What we are doing here, in a cost-conscious fashion, is to create organs which will simultaneously solve the supply problem and the immunological issue. This goal has not yet been reached, but we are making significant progress. At this stage we are looking for outside funding to ramp up production at multiple centers across the country.
    “What you see in this row of baths are kidneys that have been created from stem cells derived from fibroblasts—connective tissue cells—of specific mice.” Yamamoto tried to interrupt to say that Rothman was covering material that had already been mentioned, but he couldn’t get Rothman’s attention. Rothman was on a roll. “I wear these magnifying lenses so I can work with the lines, but take my word for it, each organ is hooked up to a pump that circulates a blood-like solution into the kidney’s main artery and out its main vein. It’s connected by a cannula, or thin tube, from its ureter to a port where its urine output can be sampled. That’s one of the functions performed by the monitoring unit beneath the bath. All the data is collected in the mainframe so we can see how tiny fluctuations in conditions affect the kidney and its development.
    “Each kidney will soon be implanted back into the same mouse that supplied the original fibroblasts. We’ve already done this twice with no rejection phenomena whatsoever.” With his hand, Rothman gestured toward another group of baths. “These vessels contain pancreases, which have quite different needs than kidneys. Initially we had more difficulty getting the organogenesis process to start than we had with the kidneys, but those initial reverses have been solved, and we are now doing equally well. With the pancreases, we have had to be very careful about the integrity of the connections with the pancreatic duct since the pancreatic secretions contain digestive enzymes. Initially some of our preparations digested themselves.”
    “Have there been any problems with teratomas?” Pia asked. In contrast to the others, she did not