Authors: Gini Hartzmark
All I know is that when Stephen puts his arms around me and buries his face in my hair, I cannot hear any of her warnings. He pulls me toward him, and Claudia’s arguments, the unspoken criticism of my partners, the reasoned voice of my own judgment are all drowned out by the rushing in my ears and the power of an attraction that is like a force that comes right up out of the ground.
CHAPTER 8
I had a hard time reconciling the five-page curriculum vitae that Stephen had left on my pillow for me to read with the black-clad rebel who stood before me. My plan for the day called for me to begin with a brief tour of Lou Remminger’s lab in order to get an overview of the ZK-501 project. The trouble was that every time I looked at the world-famous chemist all I could think of was what she would look like given twenty minutes in a room with my mother and an ample supply of soap and water.
About Dr. Remminger this much I knew already. She’d arrived at Azor unannounced the preceding April and marched into Stephen’s office. To his astonishment she set a glass vial on the desk without saying a word. In it was three grams of ZK-501—at that time it was the world’s entire supply.
A graduate student in Remminger’s lab, fishing around for a dissertation topic, had purified it as an exercise and then spent the next several months divining its structure. When he presented his preliminary results to Remminger she immediately recognized the molecule’s potential and hastily began conducting tests in animals. The results confirmed what she’d suspected—ZK-501 dramatically reduced inflammation in tissue. That all the animals in question also died did nothing to dampen her enthusiasm.
Before the day she showed up at Azor, Stephen had known Lou Remminger by reputation only. Heretical, brilliant, and blessed with a killer instinct for doing the right experiment, at thirty-one Remminger was considered one of the world’s preeminent organic chemists. Yale had granted her tenure on her twenty-eighth birthday and since then Harvard had tried three times unsuccessfully to woo her to Cambridge. He could hardly believe that now she was telling Stephen that she wanted to come to work for Azor.
Lou Remminger believed that ZK-501, like cortisone, was a spectacular trigger of a molecule—one of the body’s master compounds for reengineering the behavior of immune cells. No doubt scenting the possibility of a Nobel prize, she had come to Stephen hoping for the chance to turn it into a drug.
In New Haven there had been nothing but obstacles. Funding was difficult, lab space scarce, and Remminger bad already exhausted what little patience she had for the endless committees from which she had to seek approval, to Stephen she sensed a kindred spirit, or at least a fellow Sambler.
Historically, new drugs have all been discovered through a process known as screening—legions of scientists in factory-like labs cooking up obscure dirt samples and testing them for reactivity. Like panning for gold, it is an inefficient system that relies primarily on luck. Indeed, it was Stephen’s disdain for just this monkeys-with-typewriters approach that had led him to launch Azor Pharmaceuticals in the first place.
What Lou Remminger proposed was something completely different. Using a process called structure-based drug design, she wanted to build a new drug the way you would build a new house—not brick by brick, but atom by atom. With ZK-501 as a blueprint, Remminger meant to construct a better molecule, one with the side effect-causing structures removed.
As he listened to her Stephen realized that for Remminger to successfully synthesize something as complicated as the ZK-501 analog she would first have to find a chemical reaction for each step of the process, one that placed the right atom in exactly the right configuration. The steps would then have to be ordered so that the later ones would not undo the earlier ones. Most important of all, the new molecule would have to be unique enough to patent, economical to produce, capable of being put into a pill or capsule, and hardy enough to survive in the digestive system long enough to reach its target.
New drugs are expensive long shots with sickening odds. Only one in thirty-five thousand new compounds becomes a successful drug. But Stephen had not gotten where he was by being afraid to roll the bones. He recognized that in Remminger’s unconventional genius stood his best chance of seeing whether structure-based design could be made to work.
“ZK-501 is such a big, sexy molecule,” confided Lou Remminger as she led me along a row of black-topped lab benches. “If I were a man it would definitely give me a hard-on.” She stopped beside a decrepit Mr. Coffee and poured us each a cup of dark, thick liquid from the pot wedged in between an autoclave and a centrifuge. I took a sniff and even though I usually drink it black I reached for the cream and sugar.
“You know that the quality of coffee in a lab is inversely related to the quality of its research,” she continued in her ripe Appalachian drawl as I dumped in a hefty slug of powdered creamer to drown the taste.
We made our way back into her office, a cluttered cubicle that held a desk piled high with papers, scientific journals, and a hundred other kinds of junk—pliers, a deflated soccer ball—even a Talbots catalog. Remminger shifted some piles in order to make a place for me to sit down. Then she took a seat behind her desk, pulled out the bottom drawer, and propped her motorcycle-booted feet on top of it.
“So tell me what you want to know,” she announced with a smile of challenge on her face. Her teeth, I noticed, were crooked, especially on the bottom. The
Lou
was short for Amylou and my guess was that there had been little enough money for necessities in the depressed mining town of her childhood that braces had never even been spoken of.
“I want to understand what you’re trying to do.”
“Get famous. Win the Nobel prize. Save the world. Beat Mikos to a new drug...There was no amusement in her voice, no self-mockery.
“It sounds like you’re pretty sure you’re going to be able to do it.”
“Right now that depends on whether crystallography can get their act together and deliver the structure of ZKBP” she declared flatly. “Until then we’re just sitting around with our thumbs up our asses.”
I looked over my shoulder at her lab. There were five or six benches, each under its own ventilation hood, with more than a dozen people that I could see, all hard at work. “Looks like you’re pretty busy,” I said.
“Busy doin’ busy work,” she replied. “Right now what we’re doin’ is exactly the same kind of shit we’re supposed to be trying to make obsolete.”
“What’s that?”
“Trial and error. We make a compound, then we test it. Then we change it slightly and test it again. Then we compare the two of them then make a third molecule that maximizes the best features of the first two...She made a loud snoring sound and let her head flop down on I her chest like a marionette on a dropped string.
“So when do you think Childress will solve the structure?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.
“Who knows? So far they don’t even have diffraction-grade crystals.”
“I apologize if I sound hopelessly ignorant, but why do they have to grow crystals in the first place?”
Lou Remminger picked up my coffee cup and looked at the muddy liquid it contained. “Let’s say we wanted to learn the molecular structure of the coffee in this cup,’’ she began. “How would you go about doing that?”
“I have no idea. Look at it under the microscope?”
“Wouldn’t work. Coffee molecules aren’t big enough to see under a regular microscope. It would just look like dirty water. No, the first thing you’d want to do is separate out the coffee from everything else you’ve got in this cup. Right now there’s coffee, but there’s also water, sugar, and whatever it is they put in that Cremora shit. The first thing we’d want to do is filter out all that stuff so that all we have left is coffee. If you want to draw parallels to this project, filtering out the junk would be Dave Borland’s job.”
“So then what happens once all you have left is coffee?”
“Then we’d have to find a way to be able to see its molecular structure.”
“Please don’t make me guess how to do that,” I pleaded.
“The easiest way would be to crystallize it.”
“How do you know it will form a crystal?”
“In theory, given the right conditions, any substance can be made to crystallize.”
“Anything?”
“Anything. Of course, some things are easier than others. Sugar and salt, for example, crystallize real easy. ZKBP, on the other hand, is an absolute bitch.”
“But why crystals?”
“Because the shape of the crystal that any substance forms is unique to that substance. A sugar crystal looks different from a salt crystal. It’s like snowflakes. Every kind of molecule is unique.”
“So assuming you are able to make a crystal of pure coffee, then what?”
“Then we’d shoot special X rays into it and use a computer to map how the X rays diffract. That way we’ll be able to put together a picture of what the molecule looks like. It’s kind of like shining a laser beam at a crystal chandelier and then deducing what the chandelier looks like from the scattered dots of light.”
“It sounds complicated.”
“Actually, the hardest part is growing the crystals. Computers grind through the mountains of data generated by the diffraction. Once you get crystals you almost always get the structure. It’s just a matter of time.”
“So what you’re saying is there’s a chance Childress won’t be able to grow crystals at all?” I asked with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t help but think of the millions of dollars Azor had already sunk into the project. Millions of dollars that would be as good as flushed down the toilet if Childress couldn’t come up with the crystals.
“Crystallography is just like voodoo,” said Remminger. “Sometimes you just gotta believe.”
“I can’t say I find that terribly reassuring,” I said, knowing that I sounded like a stereotypical lawyer.
“Like my grandma always says: honey, sometimes you just gotta have faith.” I’m sure I didn’t look exactly convinced. “Did Stephen ever tell you how I decided to become a chemist?” she asked.
“No.”
“Well, I wasn’t much of a student growing up,” she began. “Not that that was any big deal. Most everyone where I grew up either went to work in the mines or in the poultry processing plant after they left school. When people where I come from talk about higher education they’re usually talking about beauty college. High school wasn’t for getting an education anyway, it was for getting drunk and partying, two things I was plenty good at. At some point during my senior year, one of the guidance counselors talked me into the taking the SATs. Hell, I wasn’t even sure what they were for. But it turned out that I scored real high—high enough to get a free ride to the University of Virginia.
“What the hell, I thought. Can’t be worse than staying here and plucking chickens, so I figured I might as well give ole U.Va. a try. Well, I’ll tell you right now, I hated it. All the other kids treated me like trailer-park trash— probably because that’s what I was. By the end of orientation I had pretty much decided I was going to flunk out. With that in mind I didn’t pay much attention to signing up for classes. Hell, I figured I wasn’t going to be around for much longer so I picked them by the alphabet. You know, like ordering from a Chinese menu, I took one from column A, one from column B.... I ended up registered for anthropology, ballroom dancing, chemistry, and data processing. I told myself I’d go to each class for a week just to see whether there were any guys worth sleeping with. The rest of the time I concentrated on getting drunk.
“I stuck to my schedule so I didn’t get to chemistry until the third week. That Monday I went to class and took a seat in the back row and started scouting out the guys. It was pretty slim pickings, let me tell you—worse than ballroom dancing. I’d practically made up my mind to get up and leave then and there when the professor went up to the board and started drawing atomic orbitals. Of course, at the time I didn’t know what they were, but that didn’t matter—to me they were absolutely the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life.
“From that moment on I forgot everything else, how geeky the guys were, how miserable I was at college.... The orbitals were a revelation. Not only were they gorgeous—those big ovals of colored chalk—but I understood them. I understood everything the professor said. It was amazing, like going to another country and discovering that somehow you already speak the language.
“When the lecture was over, all I could think of was that if this was chemistry, then chemistry is what I wanted to do, what I had to do. I ran right over to the bookstore and bought the textbook. Oh no, I thought, this is where it’s going to start getting hard. I lay down on the bed and every time I started a new chapter I’d say to myself, okay, now this is where I’m going to not understand it. But that never happened. I read that whole book from start to finish that night. I just couldn’t get enough of it.
“In four years I took every undergraduate and graduate course offered by the chemistry department. I took most of the biology and physics courses, too. When I graduated, they couldn’t figure out which degrees to give me since I’d fulfilled the requirements for about four of them. And yet, you know what happened when I got to graduate school? I had to fight with guys like Michael Childress to work in a halfway decent lab. In every class, I had to put up with pencil-necked dweebs not listening to what I had to say because I was a woman. Believe me, if I’d been a man they’d have treated me like the fucking messiah.”
“You don’t think they might have been a little put off by your rather unconventional style?” I ventured, no doubt sounding like a female version of a pencil-necked dweeb.
Lou Remminger tilted her head back and cackled. “You don’t think I dressed like this when I was in graduate school, do you? Hell, it’s taken me years to get pissed off enough to start dressing like this.”
When I got back to Danny’s office I was surprised to find Elliott Abelman sitting behind the desk systematically going through the drawers. I wanted to say something clever, but I couldn’t think of anything, so instead I just stood in the doorway watching him. He was wearing a blue dress shirt, open at the neck, and the soft mop of his brown hair flopped across his forehead like a little boy’s as he peered and rooted through the various compartments of the desk. At some point he must have sensed he was being watched because he looked up suddenly, grinning and unrepentant.