Transhuman

February 3, 2014
Iconoclastic cellular biologist Luke Abramson is determined to save his dying eight-year-old granddaughter, Angela, with his cutting-edge treatment for cancer. Inconveniently, his process is not yet approved for use on humans, and he’s stymied by the objections of Angela’s parents. When Luke and Angela vanish, FBI special agent Jerry Hightower is assigned to recover them. While Luke’s allies are manipulating him to gain control of his revolutionary treatments and the profit they promise, his enemies will go to great lengths to keep the life-extension genie in its bottle. Luke has more immediate concerns: the side effects of the treatments that he has inflicted on himself and his helpless granddaughter are progressive and potentially lethal. Characters struggle to escape cliché (Angela’s mother “screeched” and “bleated” upon discovering the kidnapping, and Native American Hightower is “unsmiling” and taciturn), and the Fugitive-style plot is all too familiar. This oddly archaic novel never manages to engage.

March 1, 2014
Scientific thriller from the author of New Earth (2013). Aging cellular-biology whiz Luke Abramson can't bear to watch his young granddaughter, Angie, die from an aggressive, untreatable brain tumor. His research indicates that if telomerase production is suppressed--thereby causing cells to die faster than normal--cancer cells should perish even more quickly than healthy cells. But nobody will sanction this potentially hazardous experiment, and even his own daughter won't agree to it, so he kidnaps the girl from her hospital bed in Boston, intending to treat her at a facility in Oregon. He persuades Angie's physician, Tamara Minteer, to go along, but Angie's distraught parents call in the FBI. Duplicitous billionaire Quenton Fisk, having backed Luke's research, offers a place for Luke, Tamara and Angie to hide while the treatment proceeds, since he'll own the results. Luke, meanwhile, too old and creaky to be dodging the FBI with a granddaughter in tow, boosts his own telomerase production, hoping to make himself younger, as his trials on mice have shown. Angie's cancer does shrink, but she develops progeria, or premature aging, as a side effect of telomerase suppression. As Luke grows younger and the FBI closes in, the White House gets wind of the case and reasons that if cancers can be cured and oldsters made youthful, the economy would collapse. These are lightweight ideas and formulaic doings carried out by cardboard characters in an improbable 1950s-style plot. Bova is usually good company, but this unabashed potboiler barely reaches tepid.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 15, 2014

Cellular biologist Luke Abramson has been making important strides toward extending life spans and eradicating disease. The work is still in the early animal-testing phases. But when his beloved granddaughter, Angela, is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, Luke begs for a chance to try to cure her. Refused on every front, he kidnaps Angela and convinces her doctor to help him get the girl to a private clinic where he can initiate the treatment. VERDICT Having the six-time Hugo Award-winning Bova's name on the cover ensures attention from sf fans for this biothriller. Most of the plot is the fast-paced action of Luke on the run, and while it does boil over into conspiracy-theory territory at times, Bova (Titan; New Earth) can be counted on to get the science right. The wish-fulfillment aspect for the octogenarian author seems a trifle obvious as the 78-year-old Luke is a babe magnet both before and after he uses his own antiaging cure.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2014
Luke is a 75-year-old cellular biologist who has been doing research on telomeres with some promising results in mice. (Telomeres are the part of the chromosome that control aging and cell reproduction. Most cells have a limit on the number of times they can reproduce, but cancer cells don't.) When his granddaughter, Angela, is diagnosed with an aggressive and fatal brain cancer, he kidnaps her, convinced that he can save her with his new therapy. He takes her and her attending physician across the country to a private lab, where Angela can be treated, all the while dodging the FBI. Things get more complicated when his sole funding source and the White House conspire to try and keep his research and publications under their control, relocating him, Angela, her physician, and her parents to a military base isolated in Idaho. 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)