Real person. Born June 1922, died 2006, aged 84. Professor of Physics at Stanford University. His father, Dr Otto Meyerhof, won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the fixed relationship between the consumption of oxygen and the metabolism of lactic acid in muscle.
Fact or Fiction
Is the cave in the novel real, and did Dr Meyerhof work there? No — although secret bunkers are believed to exist in old disused mines in Nevada, the cave itself is fictional.
Is PHG (the novel's fictional serum) real? Unfortunately not. But the science it's loosely based on — telomere elongation — is real, and genuinely being researched as a route to slowing cellular ageing. Human DNA editing, through tools like CRISPR, is being researched too. So maybe it's not as far away as it sounds.
Why Dr Meyerhof
Lee Davies chose Dr Meyerhof because he felt like a natural fit for the story — entirely feasible that a real physicist of his era could have unknowingly stumbled on something like PHG while researching vaccines. That research was well underway during the Second World War, when there was a real threat of chemical weapons being used by Nazi Germany.