The Last Enemy - A history of the present future - 1934-2084 Read online

  The Last Enemy

  A history of the present future

  1934-2084

  Luca Luchesini

  Edited by Isabel Spinelli

  Copyright 2017 by Luca Luchesini

  Disclaimer

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, business establishments, events and locations is entirely coincidental.

  Introduction

  London - July 27, 2084

  This eBook celebrates the 150th birthday of Louis Picard, the man who freed mankind from mortality with the anti-aging drug that he invented in 1981, called Telomerax. While we, the average individuals, remain subject to illnesses, accidents and, more than ever, our own violence, we have painfully discovered along the way that revealed Telomerax as the hidden secret of the happy few in this world.

  As Louis Picard and Telomerax are inevitably associated to each other, we have decided to celebrate his birthday with a feature story that is at the same time both a biographical interview and a brief history of the world during the last half a century. We, the chief editors of the New Times, ask in advance for the forgiveness of our readers if at times the biography turns into a historical novel. We also would like to thank Louis for the time he spent with us in holoconference from his private mansion on the Aeolian island of Salina. We have structured the story of his life among four sections:

  Part 1: Discovery - Beginning from the birth of Louis in 1934 and ending in 2010, when the drug was developed in secret and a circle of guardians established to protect the secret. That is, until its members were detected by security agencies, at the end of 2010.

  Part 2: Detection and Awareness - 2011 to 2023, when knowledge and use of the drug started to circulate.

  Part 3: Prohibition and War - 2024 to 2054, when most governments banned the drug and how this led to the breakup of worldly order and the elimination of three fourths of mankind.

  Part 4: The New Order - 2054 to present day, when mankind was rearranged along completely new geographic and political lines, with new states, ways of life and the emergence of the new international order.

  Thirty years after the end of the war, the controversial question of whether the discovery of Telomerax has been more beneficial or not to mankind, still sparks a heated debate. Therefore as chief editors of the New Times, we want to take the occasion of Louis’ birthday to try and build a new, fairer view while the suffering and hatred of the wars is subsiding and slowly becoming a part of history. We hope that you enjoy this journey, and we encourage you to contribute to the discussion and share any relevant opinions or thoughts on our website http://lastenemythebook.blogspot.com.

  Part One

  Discovery

  Chapter 1

  Louis Picard was born on July 27, 1934 in the city of Lille, located in northern France. Being the son of a pharmacist and a mathematics teacher at the local high school, Louis enjoyed a comfortable and happy childhood in a respectable family of the French bourgeoisie. Since his infancy, he showed a brilliant mind which his mother nourished with private lessons.

  At the age of five, Louis could already read and write fluently. His parents were thinking about sending him to Paris in a special college for gifted students, when the Nazi’s invasion of France brought those plans to an end.

  We begin the interview by asking him to recall that period.

  “Mr. Picard, what was your experience of World War II like?”

  The hologram of Louis appears. He is a handsome man in his early forties with dark hair and a bronzed complexion, dressed in a casual white shirt. He responds calmly and sincerely,

  “I have to say, my parents did the utmost to shield me from the duress that war brings. Luckily Lille was never the site of a major battle, neither during the Nazi invasion nor during the liberation by the Allied forces in 1944. But you could however experience the poverty, the cold winters and the general sense of uneasiness while living in a place where Gestapo, the powerful and secretive Nazi police force, always had the last word.

  Due to its proximity to the British Channel, Lille was under authority of the German military and a few wrong words could have you arrested and detained by the secret police. As a result, my parents tried to keep me at home as much as possible. They, themselves, only went out to work or run errands.

  We lived in Rue de Valmy, in a three story building, that housed the pharmacy shop of my father on the ground floor and our apartment on the floors above.”

  “Do you recall any specific event that helped to shape your life?”

  “Well, you have to know that between 1940 and 1941, many houses had been confiscated by the Nazis to accommodate soldiers and officers. Living in our town, one of those officers had fallen to the temptations of the beautiful French women and had contracted Syphilis. He visited my father’s shop regularly, for this, as he was the only German-speaking pharmacist in town. Apparently the treatment was successful enough for the high-ranking officer, that my father was able to keep the house.

  At the time, I did not understand anything about sexual diseases, however I had the very clear perception that we were better off than the others because my father was good with chemistry, and eventually that would contribute to my own destiny. During those years, the bond with my mother became stronger than ever before, as she spent almost all afternoon with me, reviewing my lessons. At the time when the Allied forces freed us from the grasp of Nazi Germany, I remember the joy, but also the suffering that rang out through the city. Suffering that was caused by the prosecutions which began erupting against the French collaborationists.

  Among many shameful events, the women who had any relations with German soldiers or officers, were exposed in public squares and had their hair shaved off. I still remember the face of my mother; the disgust she held in her eyes. And I immediately was moved to disgust along with her. So somehow the victory came with mixed feelings.”

  “Was your family also affected by the collaborationist prosecutions? And how did that help to shape your mind?”

  “We were not affected directly, however my father got some threats for his alleged service to German occupation troops. Those rumors all came from some envious neighbors that could not cope with the fact that he had kept house and shop, while they had been forced to relocate.

  He was spared the worst. In the end he always made sure to take care of his fellow compatriots without any preferences over the occupying troops. The public humiliation of those women served as a scapegoat to discharge all community tensions, and we did benefit from it in that way. But my father no longer felt safe in Lille and in the spring of 1945, he decided to move to Paris.

  So for me the end of the war was a mixed experience, joyful for the end of the occupation, combined with the feeling that people had not learned alot from it.”

  The Picards moved to Paris and took residence in a comfortable apartment in Boulevard Raspail, on the Rive Gauche. Louis went to high school and later enrolled in Medicine at Sorbonne University. He was still an undergraduate student, when in 1954, he stumbled on the legendary article of Watson and Crick that described the structure of DNA.

  For Louis it was the equivalent of a religious revelation, and although he could not comprehend all of the details, he understood that this discovery was about to change his future and the future of the entire world. He started taking courses in biology and managed to get acquainted with the head group leading researches in biochemistry.

  “How would yo
u describe those years? When did you decide to major in biochemistry?”

  “It was absolutely insane. I was trying to get two degrees at once, spending more than sixteen hours every day between books, laboratories and in libraries. To better understand the research documents, I also had to teach myself English. Things improved a bit when I eventually graduated in Medicine in 1957, but this led to a clash in my family. I made it very clear that I did not want to continue in the medical field and instead focus on the new frontier of biology and genetics.

  But this was purely an intellectual drive. I was still lacking the compelling event that would push me to devote my life to the quest of immortality - if you allow me this hefty expression.”

  “And the compelling event came with the illness and death of your mother.”

  “Yes, she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1956 and after a struggle that lasted two years, she passed away in 1958. During that time my father and I used all the connections we had to try to save her, but it was clear from the very beginning that it was a lost battle. And even as a young undergraduate, I could see that doctors - a kin to which I am now a part of - were not able to properly define the problem. There were too many missing pieces and a certain reluctance to apply the latest findings of biology and genetics to experiments.

  I felt like we were in the times where medicine was being tested to fight off infections, before Pasteur discovered bacteria.

  As for me, in the words of Elias Canetti, I felt like death was physically our only worst enemy. I decided I wanted to figure out a way to conquer it. With a good amount of the arrogance any young man has, I came to the conclusion that Medicine was just a pure waste of my time. So I switched my focus onto biochemistry and the study of genetics because I knew that it was the most promising, and probably only way, to defeat death in my lifespan.”

  “I see that neither religion nor spirituality were of any comfort to you. Were you already an atheist before you started your research?”

  Louis pauses for a few seconds to ponder an answer, and then his blue eyes flash as he continues.

  “I would not describe myself as an atheist, neither in those times nor the present. It is true that I was raised in an environment that was quite indifferent to religion and against some of its most dogmatic forms, as my father declared himself a liberal follower of Voltaire, and my mother came from a socialist radical family that backed the French Third Republic.

  However, it would be unfair to say that they were completely hostile to religion. They realized that atheism could become a faith in itself, and a very damaging one at that. They were indeed interested in the genesis of religious beliefs and at some time my father also engaged in a letter exchange with Emile Durkheim, the sociologist that studied the phenomena linked to the collective psychology of religion and its influence on society.

  The fact is, religion for me always remained one of the many, often contradictory, expressions of my mind that somehow got demoted to a lower priority when other very cogent experiences like love, sorrow, professional achievement, and death came into play. And over the last several years we have all witnessed where having a certain interpretation of religion can lead us.

  So you might be better off calling me an agnostic with genuine envy towards those that have true and peaceful faith, and at the same time fear to engage with them. I cannot exactly explain why. Fear of losing control, maybe.

  Anyway, back to 1958. Immediately after we had the burial ceremony for my mother in the Montparnasse cemetery, I left France and applied to study Biology at the University of Cambridge, that at the time was home to one of the team of researchers from the so-called “Phage group”, and where James Watson and Francis Crick had perfected their research of the DNA structure at the beginning of the 1950s. The environment was fantastic, and by the time I finished my PhD thesis in 1962, I had come to meet all the major researchers active in the field. Among other events, I also met my first wife there, Alicia Paulson. She was working as a research associate in quantum physics at the Cavendish Lab, where a number of Nobel Prize winners had worked. We got married in 1961. We shared the same deep passion for science but for reasons I never quite understood, I never talked openly to her about my actual goals.”

  “Was this because you did not feel she would approve of your intentions?”

  “Well, maybe. Or maybe it was my fault. I was not able to assert and defend my intentions yet, even with the person whom I loved. For sure it did not help the relationship in the long run and eventually we divorced in 1967, as my focus on research started to absorb all my time and energy. Fortunately, both Alicia and I realized we were simply not on the same page. She wanted a child, while I was working on a project in which children would be a big problem - although at that time I did not know it.”

  Louis stops in the middle of the sentence, and turns his head towards the large glass window in the polished living room of his villa. He seems to hesitate for a moment, looking beyond the blossoming Hibiscus flowers in his Mediterranean garden, and focusing on a point somewhere in the middle of the sea.

  “Yet there was still something wrong. What was it?”

  “How can I explain…after a few semesters at Cambridge I was already regarded as a sort of “young prodige” of genetics and biochemistry. Before I completed my dissertation, I had multiple offers to join the best universities to continue my research. However there were a few factors which I was not expecting, that threatened to jeopardize my mission.

  First of all, I did not have the freedom to lead my research in the direction that I wanted. There seemed to be a certain academic mainstream to follow, and this came with guardrails on the resources you could have at your disposal, and a boss to whom you were required to report your findings. No matter if you were the brightest scholar in centuries.

  Second, while my fellow researchers were certainly driven by the desire of knowledge, they had more mundane objectives; such as their academic career, longing for public recognition, and even rivalry against other research groups. Very few, if any at all, shared my total commitment. From this point of view, I was more of a priest or a missionary, than a scientist.

  Lastly, my colleagues quickly sensed this division and over the following years I found myself more and more disengaged. So it was clear that, once again, I had to drastically change my approach if I wanted to continue my quest. But unlike my previous change of switching colleges, it was more about how to do it rather than what to do.”

  The opportunity presented itself on the train that was taking me and Alicia back to Paris during the summer of 1962.”

  Chapter 2

  “On the train you found a copy of Paris Match, the most popular magazine at the time, where L’Oreal had posted research and development jobs available for their soon-to-be-launched skin products division.”

  “Yes. At first glance, however, I ignored it. I was far too advanced for the positions they were offering and the only thing my research and the job had in common was that there were cells involved. But by the time the train entered the Gare du Nord in Paris, I had come to the conclusion that it was the perfect opportunity and I sent my resume directly from the post office that was inside the station.

  A few days later I received a telegram at my father’s house that invited me for an interview at their headquarters in Clichy, located in the outskirts of Paris. It was there where I met Xavier Langlois, the director of the hair products department, at that time.

  He was a very tall man, dressed in an impeccable suit. He showed me into his spacious office, furnished with antique chairs and a huge round table that served as his desk. He greeted me by asking why a brilliant scientist like myself would ever consider joining a cosmetics company and added that he would not hire me in any case, as I must have some kind of mental problem.

  Tough start. One hundred and twenty-two years have passed and I still vividly remember every moment of that interview. He had been brutally honest. After having said that, he leaned back int
o his chair and stared at me, waiting for my explanation. It was time to make my move.

  “Monsieur,” I replied, “I read in the job posting that you are looking for a qualified biochemist to run an ambitious project in cosmetic research. After reading my resume, you cannot question my expertise. On the contrary, you have not yet demonstrated to me that your project is ambitious enough for me to consider it.”

  Xavier’s face transformed. He cleared his throat, as an attempt to compensate for his rude introduction and spoke simply.

  “Indeed, this project is too intricate to describe in an ad. As you well know, we produce top-selling products, and we want to set up a lab to better investigate the function of cells and apply this knowledge to create rennovated products.

  Your education as a physician and your recent experience in cell research obviously qualifies you for the job, but I doubt that you would appreciate our environment. I hope to bring new ground-breaking products to the market.”

  “Monsieur, then I think we share the same ideas. One of the main problems I am having now at the university, is that we are not focused enough on improving the common good of society.

  We have studied the code that rules cell replication, but do not want to seriously commit our efforts to how, for example, this could be applied to aging. Therefore I think that I would be able to contribute more at L’Oreal than at Cavendish Lab in Cambridge.