"The Pyramid In The Desert" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

УI concede you that any report has to include the human detail to be readable, but honestly, the minute I stray off the straight and narrow track of formulas, my reports get so chatty they read like a gossip column. ItТs hopeless.

УWhen you get back you can write in the explanatory material yourself, from what I tell you on this disk. You write better anyhow. Here goes:

УItТs hard to organize my words, IТm not used to talking at a faceless dictaphone. A typewriter is more my style, but I canТt type lying down, and every time I try writing with a pen, I guess I get excited, and clutch too hard, and my finger bones start bending, and I have to stop and straighten them out. Bending oneТs finger bones is no fun. The rubbery feel of them bothers me, and if I get scared enough, the adrenalin will upset my whole endocrine balance and set me back a weekТs work.

УLetТs see: Introduction. Official purpose of experimentЧto investigate the condition of old age. Aging is a progressive failure of anabolism. Old age is a disease. No one has ever liked growing old, so when you write this into beautiful prose you can call itЧСThe Age-Old Old-Age problemТ.Ф

УNowdays there is no evolutionary reason why we should be built to get old. Since we are learning animals, longevity is a survival factor. It should be an easy conquest, considering that each cell is equipped to duplicate itself and leave a couple of young successor cells to carry on the good work. The trouble is, some of them just donТt. Some tissues brace themselves to hang on fifty years, and you have to get along with the same deteriorating cells until death do you part.

УFrom NatureТs point of view that is reasonable. The human race evolved in an environment consisting mainly of plagues, famines, blizzards, and saber-toothed tigers. Any manТs chances of staying unkilled for fifty years were pretty thin. Longevity was not worth much those days. What good is longevity to a corpse?

УWe have eliminated plagues, famines, and saber-toothed tigers, but old age is still with us. One was meant to go with the other, but evolution hasnТt had time to adjust us to the change.

УThat Russian scientist started me on this idea. Boglametz. He gave oldsters a little of their lost elasticity by injections of an antibody that attacked and dissolved some of their old connective tissue and forced a partial replacement.

УI just want to go him one better, and see if I can coax a replacement for every creaking cell in the body.

УYou can see how it would be a drastic processЧhalfway between being born again and being run through a washing machine. There is nobody I dare try it on except myself, for IТll have to feel my way, working out each step from the reactions to the last step, like making up a new recipe by adding and tasting.



УItem: The best way to test your theories is to try them on yourself. Emergency is the mother of exertion.

УThirty-eight is just old enough to make me a good guinea pig. I am not so old and fragile that I would break down under the first strain, but I am not so young that a little added youth wonТt show.

УOne question isЧjust how many tissues of any kind dare I destroy at once. The more I clear away at once, the more complete the replacement, but it is rather like replacing parts in a running motor. You wonder just how many bolts you can take out before the flywheel comes off its shaft and flies away. Speed should help. A quick regrowth can replace dissolved tissue before the gap is felt. The human machine is tough and elastic. It can run along on its own momentum when it should be stopped.

УThis winter I bred a special strain of mold from some hints I had found in the wartime research reports on the penicillia. The mold makes an art of carrying on most of the processes of life outside of itself. Digestion and even most of the resynthesis of assimilation is finished before the food touches the plant. Its roots secrete enzymes that attack protein, dismantle it neatly down to small soluble molecules, and leave them linked to catalytic hooks, ready to be reassembled like the parts of a prefabricated house.

УThe food below the mold becomes a pool. The mold plants draw the liquid up through their roots, give it the last touch that converts it to protoplasm, provide it with nucleus and throw it up in a high waving fur of sporangia.

УBut that liquid is magic. It could become the protoplasm of any creature with the same ease and speed. It could be put into the bloodstream and be as harmless as the normal rough aminos, and yet provide for an almost instantaneous regrowth of missing flesh, a regrowth complete enough, I hope, to allow the drastic destruction and replacement I need.

УThat may provide the necessary regeneration, but to have the old cells missing at the proper time and place, in the proper controlled amounts, is another problem entirely. The Russians used the antibody technique on horses to get a selectively destructive serum. That is all right for them, but it sounds too slow and troublesome for me. The idea of innoculating a horse with some of my connective tissue doesnТt appeal to me somehow. How am I supposed to get this connective tissue? Besides, I donТt have a horse. The serum farms charge high.

УAfter watching a particularly healthy colony of mold melting down a tough piece of raw beef I decided that there are other destructives than antibodies.

УI forced alternate generations of the mold to live on the toughest fresh meat I could find, and then on the dead mold mats of its own species. To feed without suicide it had to learn a fine selectivity, attacking only flesh that had passed the thin line between death and life. Twice, variants went past the line and dissolved themselves back to puddles, but the other strains learned to produce what was needed.

УThen I took some of the enzyme juice from under a mat, and shot the deadly stuff into a rabbitЧthe brown bunny with the spot. Nothing happened to Bunny, she just grew very hungry and gained an ounce. I cut myself, and swabbed the juice on the cut. It skinned the callus from my fingertips, but nothing happened to the cut. So then I sent a sample over to the hospital for a test, with a note to Williams that this was a trial sample of a fine selective between dead and live tissue, to be used cautiously in cleaning out ragged infected wounds and small local gangrene.



УWilliams is the same irresponsible old goat he always was. There was an ancient patient dying of everything in the book, including a gangrenous leg. Williams shot the whole tube of juice into the leg at once, just to see what would happen. Of course it made a sloppy mess that he had to clean up himself. It served him right. He said that the surprise simply turned his stomach, but the stuff fixed the gangrene all right, just as I said it would. It was as close and clean as a surgical amputation. Nevertheless he came back with what was left of the sample and was glad to be rid of it. He guessed it to be a super catalyst somehow trained to be selective, and he wanted to get rid of it before it forgot its training.

УWhen I asked about the old patient later, they said that he woke up very hungry, and demanded a steak, so they satisfied him with intravenous amino acids, and he lived five days longer than expected.

УThat was not a conclusive check, but it was enough. I labeled the juice СHТ for the acid ion. СHТ seemed a good name somehow.