The time is now. The place is right here. The people are your usual Bay Area office-park denizens — gene jockeys and computer geeks and business types with flashy cars. They work at a biotech firm that looks like every other nondescript corporate HQ along I-880. They worry about stock prices and foreign buyouts, and in the summer some of them go to Burning Man. Then they develop a gene therapy that extends life indefinitely, and to escape religious wingnuts and government agents and industry rivals, they flee to the desert, where they continue their work in a secret trailer complex funded by billionaires with a yen for eternal youth. Did we mention we’re talking about characters in a novel, and not, say, the people who work in the industrial park across the street from your office?
Specifically, it’s a novel called Forever and Ever, the first release from a very unusual publishing house called Catbird. It is literally a house, a pleasantly beige suburban tract home in the Hayward hills. Catbird is powered by the unlikely alliance of a writer, a biotech executive, and a retired schoolteacher, all of whom happened to find themselves on the same block one summer and decided to stir up some trouble.
Credits: Craig LaRotonda/Revelation Studios The writer: Baker Credits: Chris Duffey The scientist: Funk Credits: Chris Duffey The sweet-talker: Brodehl Credits: Chris Duffey
They dub their hideout the Engine Room, which to the untrained eye looks like a very tidy den. Their leader is Commandante Supremo, who also goes by the more prosaic name of Dan Baker. He is the author of Catbird Novel Numero Uno, and bestower of nicknames. Catbird’s scientific adviser is Commodore Zero, aka Walter Funk, Ph.D, who by day seeks out cancer and heart-disease therapies as VP of research for Nuvelo, a San Carlos-based biopharmaceuticals company. Commander Josephine, or Pat Brodehl, is marketing director, and her job is to sweet-talk publications like Oprah’s O magazine and the Library Journal Book Review into considering a book from a publishing company no one has heard of, on a topic people don’t expect to encounter in the literature section at Barnes & Noble.
To wit: The book’s main character is chief scientist at a drug-discovery company. Her life’s great passion is preimplantation embryo screening. Within the first few chapters, Baker has dropped phrases like “telomerase induction,” “germ-line engineering,” and “FDA approval process.” The Bridges of Madison County this ain’t.
As for book-jacket PR, rare is the novel that’s blurbed almost entirely by bona fide stem-cell researchers and physicians. “Not only are the techniques, the medicine, the companies, and the people all accurate, but his scientific theme — reversal of human aging — is about to become reality,” wrote Michigan State University’s Michael Fossel, author of the decidedly nonfiction Reversing Human Aging.
Stanley Shostak, an emeritus developmental biologist at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Becoming Immortal: Combining Cloning and Stem Cell Therapy, lauded Catbird’s first book this way: “Baker got the science right!”
But getting the science right is only one of the publisher’s ambitions. The other is to make some noise. The company’s plan is to commission future books by Bay Area scientists who will, they hope, produce no-holds-barred meditations on the real-life implications of the technologies they are cooking up. Catbird is already trolling the local science community for submissions, asking researchers if they have any literary work stashed in a drawer. The region’s biotech industry, Catbird’s founders agree, is long overdue for a creative outlet, a public way to discuss what a future shaped by biotech might look like.
Working scientists are by nature constrained in their public statements — there are grants to maintain, shareholders to please, company PR execs to approve their wording and ethicists waiting to parse it. Young academics, meanwhile, have their tenure to consider.
“You’re rarely going to get an academic to rail against his institution or provide some biting commentary about the granting process, or get a biotech or pharmaceutical person to describe their interactions with the FDA in any candid way, because that would be career suicide,” Funk says. “But it’s important for the public to understand the way these interactions and negotiations occur at a level that would probably be best served by someone having at least an anonymous veneer between them and their words.”
To this end, Catbird proposes two solutions: One is to encourage scientists to write under the veil of fiction, perhaps teaming them with creative writers. The other is the liberal use of pen names. “We’ll assign you a code name like ‘Goldfinger’ just for the pure hell of it and let everybody else figure out who you are!” Baker roars. In short, Catbird is looking for the next Anonymous to write the high-tech equivalent of Primary Colors.
Don’t worry, the first paragraph of this story wasn’t a plot spoiler — just the start of protagonist Dr. Jasmine Metcalf’s journey into an underground world of secret labs and high-stakes experiments. The story begins with a child who has progeria, a very real — and very rare — genetic disorder that vastly accelerates aging. Stricken children look like tiny, wizened old people by the time they are toddlers, and don’t live past puberty.
In the book, Jasmine and her husband Earl, a physician and biotech researcher, are determined to save the life of an eight-year-old progeric boy. They figure out a way to manipulate the genes that control his rapid aging, and quickly realize this therapy could be applied to anyone.
That’s where the trouble begins. In escaping the politics of a world not quite ready for age reversal, the Metcalfs get swept up with outlaw embryonic-stem-cell researcher Will Behlen. Will and his underground confederates practice what Baker calls “garage science,” privately funded research conducted without protection or oversight from a university or public company, and often outside the law. At one point, Jasmine asks Will if he’s doing a particular cutting-edge experiment “in silico” — meaning via computer modeling, which traditionally happens well before clinical trials are approved for human subjects. Will responds that he’s working “in Fed-Exia,” by having medical supplies shipped to his hideout.
Along the way, the characters explore the practical concerns of their work — they fret about politics, backlash from the religious right, and whether the therapy will cause hideous side effects. But they also struggle with its personal implications. Most are nearing retirement age, so they fantasize about having creamy skin and lustrous hair again, wonder if they should start second families, and worry that by denying themselves death they are missing out on the complete human experience.
Science usually wins the debate, at least in this novel. As the character Earl puts it: “If Mother Nature didn’t want us fine-tuning evolution, then she wouldn’t have given us four pounds of brain. Maybe that was the ultimate wild card.”
Science fiction has a long history of intertwining social commentary with action adventure — think Brave New World or Fahrenheit 451 — but Baker, an otherwise amiable and voluble guy with an enormous shock of silver hair, bristles if you call his work sci-fi. True, Forever and Ever is no allegory. It’s not set in a distant future where everyone is running around in pleather catsuits and shooting ray guns. It comes with a glossary.
Although eternal youth is still quite a stretch, everything else in the book is based on current innovations in stem-cell technology, gene therapy, and today’s life-extension-research industry. “Most of the technology that Dan used in the book is here now,” Walter Funk affirms. “From cell culture to gene culling to synthetic genes to manipulating the genome, we’re doing all of those things.”
That might qualify the novel for “hard science fiction,” a branch of the genre devoted to accuracy and technical rigor, but Baker would vastly prefer the term “science-based fiction,” or perhaps “high-tech thriller.” He likens his work to that of Michael Crichton and The Da Vinci Code‘s Dan Brown. In fact, his inability to escape the sci-fi tag is part of why he launched his own publishing house. He couldn’t convince anyone — the Texas literary agent who’d sold his previous book, the Hollywood agent who’d brokered his last screenplay deal, the New York editor to whom he’d explained his storyline — that the science in his manuscript wasn’t entirely fantasy.
“The very first thing I heard is, ‘It’s science fiction,'” he recalls. “And I said, ‘No, you don’t quite understand — I live in the Bay Area, and investors just put $2 billion into Geron and other companies. These gene jockeys are talking half-seriously about pulling this off.'”
Indeed, the entities that populate his book are thinly veiled versions of real Bay Area companies and science legends. The Metcalfs work for a drug-discovery company called (cough) Genetechna. Baker won’t reveal who inspired his characters, but readers so inclined will no doubt spot uncanny resemblances to local luminaries, including Geron cofounder Michael West, UC San Francisco telomere expert Elizabeth Blackburn, and Jim Kent of UC Santa Cruz, a programmer who raced against DNA-sequencing powerhouse Celera Genomics and helped ensure that human genome data remained in the public domain.
So if the characters are based on real people and the science on real science, what about the idea that may sound the wildest of all to readers — that researchers might really ditch their laboratories for a trailer in the desert?
Actually, Funk says, garage science isn’t such a farfetched idea: Life sciences are increasingly heir to the startup culture that once belonged to the computer industry. You no longer need a zillion-dollar lab to get work done — what you need is a decent courier to deliver the needed chemicals. “So much of what goes on in biotech labs or in pharmaceutical labs is done by FedEx,” he says. “It’s not like you have to have a class one facility or a containment facility to go out and purchase this stuff. You could have it delivered to your house if you really wanted to.”
In fact, Funk says, things once considered difficult, like gene sequencing, are now routine. “Most biotech companies and a lot of academics centers now send out their samples to have the DNA sequence analyzed to what are literally mom-and-pop shops, where they send the kids out to go pick up the samples every day and they get them funneled into a little facility either in an anonymous nearly-empty business park or literally in their garages,” he says. “They bang out sequence and send you the information by e-mail.”
Despite Baker’s efforts to keep it semi-real, it was hard to get the people who inspired his characters to comment on the book for this story — even though Baker says that some of them have privately told him they enjoyed it. Sure, the characters get up to some wild behavior that may not reflect reality, but Funk points out that some scientists (or their PR wranglers) simply might want to distance themselves from the concept of human immortality. Longevity research, after all, is a field that attracts kooks and hucksters along with talented scientists. “It’s everything from spectacular, top-notch, cutting-edge molecular detail in genetics to, really, quackery,” he says. Working researchers might want to avoid association with its flakier side.
From the safety of retirement, Pitt professor emeritus Stanley Shostak, who has spent a lifetime cranking out books with titles such as Evolution of Death — Why We Are Living Longer, will happily tell you that he was the model for Will, an assertion Baker will neither confirm nor deny. “I thought it was very advanced,” Shostak says of the novel’s science. “Half my former colleagues wouldn’t be so sharp.”
But, uh, could anything like this ever really happen?
Shostak, always a dry wit, pauses a moment to consider. “There is no such thing as science fiction,” he says finally.
If Forever and Ever is a book is about garage scientists, then Catbird is, fittingly, a garage publisher. That, in fact, is where most of the copies of the first edition are stacked awaiting shipping, which has everything to do with Dan Baker’s circuitous voyage through the media world.
He didn’t start out as a writer at all — his first medium was film. As a teenager from Portland, Oregon, Baker would travel down to San Francisco to shoot concerts at the Fillmore. Later, as a merchant Marine, he sailed twice to Vietnam at the height of the war, and says he once jumped ship and spent a month running around the country posing as a freelance journalist, thanks to his camera.
Returning home in 1969, he was immediately drafted, but refused induction. He’d already seen what Vietnam was like. “As far as I know,” he says wryly, “I am the only conscientious objector who went to Vietnam.” He says he was originally sentenced to three years in prison, which was reduced to three years of alternative service at the University of Oregon Medical School. It turned out Uncle Sam did Baker’s literary career a huge favor, because it was there that virtually all of the seeds of Forever and Ever were sown.
Baker worked as an orderly in the emergency room, then as a laboratory assistant for a physiologist studying a heart defect in children. It was his first exposure to research scientists, and he admired their thirst for knowledge, or, as he puts it, their lives as “curiosity junkies.” His time in the ER running the breathing bag for cardiac-arrest patients and wheeling the dead down to the morgue gave him plenty of opportunities to cogitate on the nature of life and death.
Baker worked around children with incurable genetic diseases and saw how they and their parents suffered — he remembers watching one mother stroke her daughter’s hair as the child had her blood drawn, and remembers the mother sobbing so hard her knees shook. It was also here that he saw his first progeric child. “Of all the things I have ever seen in my life, I could not believe my eyes were seeing this,” Baker recalls, “a little boy who looked like a miniature old man with yellow fingernails, bent over with big watery eyes and wrinkled skin and a bald head and who could barely walk from arthritis.”
Yet it would take thirty years of percolation before Baker put these thoughts down on paper. Instead, with his service finished, he returned to his original love — camerawork — and became a stringer for a Portland TV station. He moved to Guam in the early ’70s to accompany his first wife on a teaching job, and there began shooting footage for a variety of Asian and European news networks as well as his own documentary projects. He moved to Honolulu and started a video production company, but then sold his share to fund his next dream: “I decided I want to do what Oliver Stone did — I want to write my way into Hollywood,” he recalls.
But finding the right story wasn’t easy. Baker spent years developing a script about Japanese “political samurai” trying to take over the United States, but couldn’t sell it. Inspired by the success of Roger & Me, Michael Moore’s theatrical-release documentary about trying to corner the CEO of General Motors for a chat, Baker then attempted a documentary about Japanese business and political power in America at the end of the ’80s. Despite some interest, it never got made. By now divorced and remarried, he moved to the South Bay with his second wife, and worked up a proposal for a book he intended to call Marilyn Monroe: Key to the JFK Assassination. That one didn’t sell, either.
Finally, Baker called up a friend from the Portland TV station who’d become an executive at the Discovery Channel, and pitched a documentary series, Great Stories of American Warriors, inspired by some of the military men he’d met in Guam. The series never materialized — Baker was so taken with his first subject, a US Army pilot, that he abandoned the project to write a book about him. One Man’s War: The WWII Saga of Tommy LaMore, was published in 2002.
For a while, it seemed Baker had it made. He had an agent, a publisher, and a title in print. The movie rights had been optioned in 2001. Baker says StudioCanal was going to finance it, and Martin Scorsese was even tapped to direct.
But he was about to discover how frustrating it is to sign away your rights. While Baker is proud of his book, certain things irritated him, such as what he considered misleading cover art. And while the movie never got made, that was perhaps a mixed blessing since Baker wasn’t crazy about the screenplay that had been commissioned. The next idea — to make it a TV miniseries — also fell through, he says, despite months of waiting around to sign the paperwork. In 2003, the option expired.
Undaunted, Baker was already onto a new project. “In 1999 the BBC did a documentary called Living Forever,” he recalls, which was about the science of human life extension. “I was sitting there trying to think of what the hell I was going to write next when I saw this documentary and I practically fell off my chair.” He soon amassed a huge library of books on the topic, and wrote the first draft of Forever and Ever as a screenplay.
Seeking some scientific feedback, Baker was referred to Funk, at that point a total stranger. Funk agreed to read the script and met Baker for a beer, marking the beginning of a very nerdy friendship. “The very first thing Walter told me,” Baker recalls, “is, ‘What you’re talking about, reversing human aging, would be a huge deal, a tremendously complex genetic intervention and change and it’s practically impossible, but it’s not completely impossible.’ Which is all I had to hear.”
Funk enjoyed the script but dubbed the science just “okay,” which was probably to be expected. At that point Baker had never even been inside a biotech firm. “I don’t know what it’s like in these companies, I don’t know what people say, I don’t know what the labs are like,” he recalls. “I could never do that unless somebody could help me.”
Baker decided to do a complete rewrite, this time as a novel, and Funk became his Sherpa through the bay’s biotech scene. The scientist let Baker tour his labs and invited him to cocktail parties with colleagues, where Baker would try to keep up with the shop talk, and then sneak off to take notes. He let Baker use a spare room in his home as a quiet place to write. And he invited him to that fateful summer block party where the two of them fell in with Pat Brodehl, one of Funk’s neighbors, who volunteered her efforts as a reader and line editor and said the words every author wants to hear: “This is a book I want to see published.”
The novel, however, proved a tough sell. Baker was having difficulty convincing his old publishing-world connections that a book about human immortality was more of a Crichtonesque thriller than traditional sci-fi. Worse, he was trying to sell them a middle-aged female protagonist. “It’s a run-jump-shoot, guy-saves-girl genre, and one of the things that you really get your ass kicked for in New York is blurring genres or not meeting expectations in genres,” Baker says. “They just throw you out of their office.”
Unable to get a bite and still feeling burned over the collapse of the One Man’s War movie deal, Baker decided to do it himself. He was inspired by the breakout success of a few self-published authors such as James Redfield. After failing to land a favorable publishing deal, Redfield sold a hundred thousand copies of The Celestine Prophecy out of the trunk of his car thanks to word-of-mouth advertising and bookstore tours. Warner Books eventually bought the rights. It became a multimillion-seller, staying on the New York Times’ best-seller list for three years.
But how to self-publish? There are any number of online vanity presses like AuthorHouse and iUniverse, but Baker wanted complete control of the rights to his work. He also knew that getting a book reviewed is crucial, but that vanity presses mostly rely on the authors to do their own publicity, and make them pay for most of their review copies to boot.
It seemed smarter to launch his own publishing company, especially once Baker learned that ISBNs — the ten-digit codes used to identify specific books — are sold to publishers in multipacks, which meant he’d have a few left over for someone else’s work. “I thought, ‘Gee, I wonder how much fiction is laying around in the biotech world,'” he recalls. “You can have poetry or monographs or fiction or just viewpoints.”
Funk also liked the idea of publishing insider accounts of the high-tech world. “There are a lot of people who would love to write about their experience in biotech as a startup company, or their experience of trying to work their way through the pharmaceutical industry, or their experience of trying to get tenure,” he says. “There are a million of those kinds of stories which will resonate.”
Brodehl provided the final encouragement — as well as the garage and the Engine Room — and in 2006 Catbird Publishing was born. That’s as in “catbird seat,” according to Baker, “because I wanted to remind myself that I would never be a passenger in my own work again.”
Being the driver is substantially more work than riding along. In the six years it took Baker to write and publish his book, he’s had to find contractors for everything a bigger publisher would have done in-house: professional editing and proofing, layout and cover design, printing, distribution, Web page hosting and development, and press-release writing. That’s in addition to Funk’s fact-checking and extra proofing by Brodehl, who compiled the glossary for less scientifically inclined readers.
Baker has had to learn the nitty-gritty of making the kind of book stores will actually stock: the correct point size for the title, the right page count, how to properly credit the designer. And Brodehl, armed with no more than a laptop, a cordless phone, and her ballooning long-distance bill, has taught herself the art of marketing at her kitchen table. Her coups so far have been keeping someone at Oprah on the line for nearly half an hour, and scoring coverage from Discover and Life Extension magazines. Her method: “You just talk sweetly over the phone.”
The whole enchilada has cost about $25,000. Yet there are still indications Forever and Ever is a homemade product. Baker has spotted quite a few typos in the first edition. A stiff round of editing that pared the manuscript to a more marketable hundred thousand words resulted in some choppy scene transitions. Baker plans to make fixes in the next edition, which he expects will run around five thousand copies. “I just have to knock off a couple more liquor stores to get the pre-press payment,” he jokes.
The first edition, whose print run was one thousand copies, is available via Amazon, and will be in bookstores in May. And of course, because Baker is still following his Oliver Stone plan, he hopes to shop the story as a movie. Meanwhile, as far as its founders know, there is nothing else like Catbird in the publishing world: a press devoted to using fiction as a vehicle for scientific commentary. Its nearest neighbor might be the life sciences journal Nature, which briefly had a fiction section called “Futures,” but discontinued it last year.
Catbird’s next challenge is to line up a roster of authors, and, as Funk points out, find the right balance of material to print. “What you really want to do is allow people to write hard, honest, direct, acerbic opinion without the pretense of having to filter it through either a commercial, legal, or ethical gauze,” he says. At the same time, he doesn’t want to publish anyone’s vendetta pieces.
If you ask folks like Shostak, there’s demand out there for such a press — the science world will provide plenty of readers eager for a glimpse inside each other’s cubes, and hungry for some amusing visions of the future. “I absolutely think that science has to have more humor and more fiction and more imagination and be just a vehicle for spilling your guts,” he says. “Let’s have some crazy ideas! We’re not really as stultified as we seem to be.”
Is the Bay Area’s high-tech scene ready to spill its guts? Can a biotech thriller climb out of a Hayward garage and onto the best-seller lists? Whatever happens next, consider it the clinical trials phase of the great Catbird experiment.
