The Troop

Q: Mr. Erikson, state how you came to be associated with Dr. Clive Edgerton.

A: I was just out of school. A few guys who graduated with me caught on as associate profs, but they were the creme de la creme. I was more like the flotsam.

Q: At loose ends?

A: You could say so. Not a lot of companies have much use for a theoretical molecular biologist whose doctoral dissertation was “The Human Aging Process as Relating to the C. elegans worm.”

Q: C. elegans worm?

A: It’s a roundworm. About a millimeter long. Caenorhabditis elegans, but everyone just calls it C. elegans. During its lifetime it exhibits many familiar signs of human aging: reduced movement, wrinkling, tissue degradation, decreased ability to fight infection. I was trying to locate genes that might slow down the human aging process.

Q: A noble ambition.

A: Yeah, well. I was blinded by science.

Q: How did Edgerton know of you?

A: A lot of researchers sniffed around the program, right? They figured they could poach a recent grad—someone willing to do the scut work.

Q: So Edgerton sought you out?

A: It was more a situation of mutual desperation.

Q: What drew him to you?

A: Like I said, the fact that I came cheap and didn’t have any other options. But I had done work with the C. elegans worm—which bears about the same similarity to the hydatid as a minnow does to a great white shark. And neither creature is anything like what Edgerton bred.

Q: He bred? Didn’t you both work on the mutated specimen?

A: Listen… I’ll always carry the guilt. I could tell you that the outcome was unknown—that I was pursuing science—and if I’d had an inkling of what was to come I’d’ve burned that lab to cinders. After all this is over you’ll send me to prison. I deserve that. Deserve more, but for some crimes there exists no fit punishment. I was part of it, but I was the lesser part. On every level.

Q: How so?

A: Clive Edgerton is a genius. He’s also ratshit crazy, pardon my French, possibly a sociopath, but undoubtedly a genius. Even though my IQ is likely higher than most people’s in this room, I was no more than Clive’s lab monkey. I can’t see biological processes the way he does. Can’t see the chains in order to break and reorder them. So I knew what we were doing, yes—theoretically, anyway—but I didn’t create any of it. I can’t.

Q: But you knew?

A: Yes.

Q: And you told nobody?

A: That’s right.

Q: Why?

A: Trade secrets. We were working on something that, if successful, would have been a billion-dollar enterprise. Edgerton was working under a grant from a biopharmaceutical company. Secrecy was crucial.

Q: So crucial that you’d risk lives?

A: We didn’t know lives were at… We’re talking about one of the three holy grails of modern medicine: a cure for male pattern baldness, a method to reverse the aging process, and a means to lose weight without effort. If anyone invents a pill that you can pop at night and wake up with a fuller head of hair or the crow’s-feet diminished around your eyes or five pounds lighter? There’s no saying how much that could be worth. Clive used to cite that old motto: You can never be too rich or too thin. He’d say, “If I can make the rich thin, they’ll make me rich.”