"Well Grandpa, you couldn't have picked a worse time to die," the rather average looking, somewhat overweight man muttered, hanging up the telephone. The speaker looked a bit young for his age, looking to be in his early thirties while his chronological age was more than ten years above that number. It ran in his family, on both parents' sides. More-so on his father's, for whatever that meant.
Looking down into his bowl of microwave macaroni and cheese the man wondered why his grandfather's death bothered him so. The old man's health had been pretty bad these last ten years-- every since he'd passed the century mark. Was it that he'd been the last of the man's grandparents? Maybe...
More likely was that the man worked at a major medical research facility. Not in any fancy capacity-- unless you counted washing floors and toilets as fancy. Still, he was friendly and the late working grad students liked talking with him, which was how he knew about Project R. The "R" stood for "Regression". As in "Age Regression." Someone had worked up some nanotechnology which could push an organism backward along the aging path. So what probably was bothering him about his grandfather's death was the fact that the project was only months away from human testing...
...as it had been for over a year now. The nanotech, it seemed, had come up with a few surprises for the research team. One, the version they had worked up for laboratory mice was, contrary to design, transmittable to humans through the air. Two, it worked all too well on humans. Instead of reversing a human's age by half (like it did with the mice), it reduced the human's age to one tenth of the starting age. A twenty year old would regress to a two year old, a fifty year old would become five, an eighty year old would become eight, etc. Whether or not aging resumed was unknown for humans. (It resumed in mice, for whatever that was worth.) The research team was trying to understand these effects before resuming their work on the human version.
From what he gathered, the reverse aging worked at about the rate of one year per week.
Staring at his telephone he thought for a while. Even if then research team got the bugs worked out soon, "Project R" would have to go through a lot of human trials, would become patented, then sold at a high cost to cover the expenses of its creation, testing, and production. Insurance probably would fight paying for it for as long as possible. He and he friends were all already starting to feel the aches and pains and other, more serious, problems of aging....
...and he knew someone who couldn't keep their mouth shut and that someone was dating a member of PETA who hated animal testing and believed in the "breaking and entering" method of animal liberation.
He picked up the telephone.
"Hello? Joy? Yeah, I just wanted to catch up about things. Say, you wouldn't believe how crappy the security is at work in the animal testing area..."