2030_ The Real Story of What Happens to America - Albert Brooks [1]
Mueller had always been interested in the immune system. So much in medicine was pointing to the body’s own defenses as a cure-all, but the success rates were modest at best. He was assigned various projects at Pfizer. Some were interesting, some he hated. He never understood the Viagra-for-women thing. Every woman he ever knew could go all night, have a bowl of cereal, and go for another afternoon, but he worked on it anyway, and when it happened it was huge.
The team got big-time bonuses and raises and all kinds of rewards. They were even sent to Hawaii, where Sam Mueller met his wife. She wasn’t Hawaiian, she was an assistant on the project whom he had never really gotten to know, but then one night on Kauai they both got drunk, walked on the beach, watched the most beautiful sunset in the world, and fell madly in love.
Maggie was a great companion for Sam. Smart, easygoing, and very supportive. He could talk to her about his ideas and she would not only listen but also encourage him. The idea she liked most was an interesting one. Something about using a person’s own blood to attack cancer cells. Sam was convinced that if a person’s blood was combined with someone else’s blood that wasn’t compatible, if the combination of the two was just right, one person’s blood cells would fight not only the other blood cells but the foreign bodies in their system as well, including the cancer. But the real break came when Pfizer merged with a Swiss firm and Sam was let go. Thank God he never told anyone there about what he was working on or they would have owned it.
With Maggie’s help, Sam Mueller raised three hundred thousand dollars, took on a partner, and started Immunicate. His blood idea was in the right direction but it didn’t work properly; it knocked out cancer cells but attacked the other organs, too, and the body’s immune system went into overdrive, killing everything. Something had to be done to make the blood combination work against the disease without working against the rest of the body. The answer turned out to be common amino acids.
Sam and his partner, Ben Wasser, spent an entire year injecting the blood with different aminos. With the help of computers they tried millions of combinations. There were so many months where they felt it was not going to work. And then on the night of June 30, 2014, they put together alanine, isoleucine, proline, and tryptophan. Four common amino acids that had never been combined before, certainly not in this precise measurement.
Two years later, over ninety-four percent of the participants in the human trials were cancer-free. There were still rare cancers that did not respond, but all the big ones were knocked out, and the success was so overwhelming that trials were stopped early and the drug was available to the general population by the spring of 2016.
CHAPTER TWO
Kathy Bernard was just five years old when she heard about the cure for cancer. It meant very little to her, although she wondered if her grandfather would benefit. She didn’t really like her grandfather, but she didn’t really like anyone. She was voted angriest girl in her sixth-grade class.
Some of the reasons were obvious—divorce, a lot of fighting in the family, a stepbrother who was a freeloader, a verbally abusive mother—but there was something else. Something that she felt even as a small child watching her family move down the ladder. Her father and mother both losing their jobs, owing more money than they had, her birthdays becoming less and less of an event. She simply felt that her generation was getting the short end of the American dream. And she wasn’t the only one her age who felt that way.
Kathy started hanging around with a gang when she got into her teens. Not