“Not necessarily,” Tom Graham said, speaking up for the first time, his voice surprisingly deep. “What you said about people not being able to afford it. Look at the statistics. There might well be thirty-five million people with diabetes in this country. It costs something like a hundred and fifty billion dollars a year to treat them. You think insurance companies won’t want to jump on this opportunity? How about state programs that have to carry the cost of these people for decades? Not to mention Medicare, Medicaid. Even far-right politicians are going to find a way around their qualms about stem cells because who won’t want to help get twenty, thirty million Americans healthy? It’s a magic bullet. If it works, it cures people. And once the organ is accepted, it costs nothing. Pancreas doesn’t work? We’ll grow you a new one and you’re welcome. People have been searching for decades for a way to reduce healthcare costs. Regenerative medicine is going to be the answer.”

This was worse than Edmund had dared think. He was a salesman; he knew that even if not every diabetic got a new pancreas, the idea of buying diabetics’ life insurance policies in a climate in which people could receive a new organ was suddenly looking very outdated, like investing in steam engines after the Model T Ford was produced.

“This is all laid out in the final report?” Russell asked.

“It will be,” Henry said. “It’s summarized in the report we’ll be giving you today.”

“Of course, this is all confidential.”

“Of course.”

“But it’s all dependent upon the date induced stem cell organs will be available,” Edmund said. “It’s not happening next week. At least I assume it isn’t. What is it—two years? Five years? Have you looked into that?”

“Perhaps Ginny here might speak a few words in that regard,” Henry said. Sitting next to Tom Graham, a tall woman with long black hair nodded to Henry. She shared Tom’s fashion sense and was wearing a T-shirt with a bright image of a robot on the front.

“I read the journals I could find online and tried to figure out some kind of timeline, but the articles in this arena aren’t very speculative. It’s a new technology so there are no statistics to predict such a big leap in something like regenerative medicine,” Ginny said.