A scientific thriller by six-time Hugo Award winner Ben Bova
Luke Abramson, a brilliant cellular biologist who is battling lung cancer, has one joy in life: his ten-year-old granddaughter, Angela. When Angela is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and given less than six months to live, Luke wants to try a new enzyme, Mortality Factor 4 (MORF4), that he believes will kill Angela's tumor.
However, the hospital bureaucracy won't let him do it because MORF4 has not yet been approved by the FDA. Knowing Angela will die before he can get the treatment approved, Luke abducts her from the hospital with plans to take her to a private research laboratory in Oregon.
But Luke is too old and worn-down to flee across the country with his sick granddaughter, especially with the FBI on their trail. So he injects himself with a genetic factor that stimulates his body's production of telomerase, an enzyme that has successfully reversed aging in animal tests.
As the chase weaves across the country from one research facility to another, Luke begins to grow physically younger, stronger. He looks and feels the way he did thirty or forty years ago. Yet his lung cancer is not abating; if anything the tumors are growing faster.
And Angela is dying.
About the Author :
Ben Bova is the author of more than a hundred works of science fact and fiction, including Able One, Leviathans of Jupiter, and the Grand Tour novels, including Titan, winner of John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation in 2005, and in 2008 he won the Robert A. Heinlein Award "for his outstanding body of work in the field of literature." He is President Emeritus of the National Space Society and a past president of Science Fiction Writers of America, and a former editor of Analog and former fiction editor of Omni. As an editor, he won science fiction's Hugo Award six times. Dr. Bova's writings have predicted the Space Race of the 1960s, virtual reality, human cloning, the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars), electronic book publishing, and much more. He lives in Florida. Stefan Rudnicki is a Grammy-winning audiobook producer and an award-winning narrator who has won several Audie Awards and been named one of AudioFile's Golden Voices. A longtime fan of Weird fiction, and of Robert W. Chambers in particular, Stefan's dramatic adaptation of The King in Yellow received the Madolin Cervantes Award from the Society of Stage Directors & Choreographers and was staged by him at the Donnell Library Center in New York City.
Review :
"An exciting and action-packed book from start to finish, this could easily be turned into a movie. Plausible twenty-first-century medical research, the bond between a grandfather and his granddaughter, and political power all serve to make this book a must-read for those who enjoyed The Fugitive. A combination of thriller, adventure, and drama will enthrall."
-- "Booklist (starred review)"
"Popular science-fiction writer and social commentator Ben Bova's meditation on new life-extending technologies is engaging, and Stefan Rudnicki's deep, rich voice adds resonance to the story."
-- "AudioFile"
