Monday, April 6
12:57 p.m.
Stone Aimes was floating through cyberspace, through the massive data pages of the National Institutes of Health. Since the Gerex Corporation had a complete clampdown on their clinical‑trial results, he was attempting an end run. By going to the source, he was hoping he could find out whether or not Karl Van de Vliet's experiments with stem cell technology were succeeding.
He needed that information to finish his book, and he hoped that the remainder of the advance could be used to pay for his daughter Amy's private school in New York, if he got it in time. He was dreaming of a life in which she could come back to live with him at least part of the year. Sometimes, particularly days like this—Monday was his official day off—he couldn't avoid the fact he was incredibly lonely.
But first things first He had gone to the section that described the many and varied clinical trials the NIH had under way. Then he used "scrambled eggs," the entry protocol given to him by Dale Coverton, to circumvent security on the site and get him into the second‑level NIH data files. He was hoping to find the names of patients who had gone through the Gerex stem cell procedure and could be interviewed.
It really wasn't all that difficult, or even—he told himself—unethical to get in this far. No big deal. Entry protocols were available to any high‑level NIH employee who had the right security grade. Now he was poking through the reams of proprietary data that the Gerex Corporation had submitted to initiate the clinical trials.
It was one of the more ambitious studies he'd ever seen, not in numbers of patients necessarily but certainly in scope. They were indeed running stage‑three clinical trials of their stem cell procedure on a variety of maladies. There was no double‑blind placebo. You either were cured or you were not.
Jesus, it was incredible. They were shooting for nothing less than the unified field theory of medicine, aiming not just to patch some failing element of the human body but to regenerate entire organs. Among their stated objectives were building pancreatic islets, reconstructing the ventricles of the heart, reconstituting the damaged livers of individuals with advanced cirrhosis. They were also accepting patients with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
"Christ," he said, scrolling past page after page, "how come they're suddenly so secretive about this?"