Free The Immortality Factor by Ben Bova

program dies. No sense risking a refusal so early in the game. I certainly didn’t want to get him worried about stem cell politics.
    But Johnston was insistent. “What’s it all about?”
    â€œWell . . .” I drew out the word reluctantly. “If this concept pans out, we might be able to do something about paraplegics.”
    â€œDo what?”
    â€œGet them up and walking, I hope.”
    â€œLike that guy who played Superman?”
    It was too late for Christopher Reeve, but at least I had Johnston’s attention. I began explaining as we strode along the factory aisle. On either side of us the biogenerators cultivated silent industrious colonies of genetically altered bacteria that were tirelessly producing more of themselves. The microbes had been designed to digest various forms of industrial wastes, crude petroleum, toxic chemicals. They were harvested and shipped to oil spills, chemical factories, paper mills, municipal landfills. There they gobbled up the wastes and converted them to carbon dioxide, methane, water.
    Other processors in the factory were producing agricultural products: bacteria that made potatoes resistant to frosts, microbes that fixed nitrogen from the air for wheat and other cereal grains so that they needed far less chemical fertilizers than previously.
    Johnston looked intrigued with my idea about paraplegics, but not happy. “Another medical project. A lot of competition there.”
    â€œNobody’s doing anything like this,” I said.
    â€œMaybe so. But you’ve got all those goddamned government agencies to deal with. Look what they’re doing to your clinical trials. Lowenstein tells me we’ll hafta send your team to Mexico, for god’s sake. Or maybe Brazil.”
    â€œThat’s part of the cost of doing business,” I replied. “You factor that into the price when the product comes on the market.”
    â€œYeah, and then the goddamned government pressures us to lower the price,” Johnston grumbled.
    I kept a straight face. I’d never heard the CEO use the word “government” without “goddamned” in front of it.
    â€œMedical projects are a big pain in the butt, you know.”
    â€œBut very profitable,” I said.
    â€œOh, yeah? You heard what the goddamned Department of Agriculture is doing now? They want us to pay royalties for the genetic materials we use. Royalties to some half-assed Third World countries who claim that the raw materials we use come from their territories. Part of the Biodiversity Treaty, they claim. Royalties, by damn! There go any profits we might make.”
    I let him grumble. There were hardly any other people on the factory floor. The equipment churned along unattended, except for the teams sitting in the monitoring stations up on the iron grillwork balcony above us. They watched their gauges and display screens as intently as any NASA mission controllers.
    But there were half a dozen men and women in white smocks standing around the conglomeration of pipes and tubing at the end of the row. They all had radiation gauges clipped to the breast pockets of their smocks.
    â€œThis is why I asked you to drop by,” Johnston said. “This is where we’re having trouble.”
    There were big red DANGER — RADIATION signs plastered on the tubing andwalls all around the equipment. I noticed that Johnston stopped a good twenty feet short of the black and yellow warning lines on the wooden floor.
    The corporation had other research operations, in addition to my lab. One of them was under way here at the Yonkers plant, a program to engineer a microbe so that it could take dissolved radioactive uranium and thorium out of contaminated water and convert them into solid pellets. The pellets would be much easier to dispose of safely than tons of radioactive water. They were working with a microbe called
Deinococcus radiodurans
, which could withstand