A little over ten years ago, I left academia to work in a small start-up biotech company on a rural industrial park in the Netherlands. I can hardly believe so much time has passed: memories of my first day are vivid and immediate. I can still remember the feeling of trepidation when the CEO – a tall, amiable Dutchman in a suit – led me through the flock of chickens scrabbling for corn outside the door. The company, as it happened, worked on a chicken virus protein, and I was suddenly convinced that this was one of the experimental cohorts.<\/p>\n
\n“Don’t worry,” the CEO said cheerfully, sensing my unspoken concern. “They’re just pets.”<\/p>\n
\nOther memories stand out like still shots in my mind: those same chickens, suddenly bedding down to sleep in the middle of the day during a total eclipse of the sun; the look on the CEO’s face when he came into my office to inform me that the World Trade Center was falling down; sunlight shining off the windows of the nearby lunatic asylum as I killed incubation times gazing out the window of the radioactive B-lab – feeling I might go mad myself with boredom, as it was too much trouble to decontaminate and degown just for those five-minute spins.<\/p>\n
\nBut the project was highly stimulating, and I enjoyed some of the most fruitful years of my career, making discoveries, writing patents, publishing papers, liaising with the German pharmaceutical company with whom we had a lucrative research contract. The company, although it was trying to diversify, had only one key finding: an apoptotic protein that seemed to have exquisite sensitivity for tumor and transformed cells. It was one of those too-good-to-be-true phenomena that no one else was working on nor, therefore, seemed to believe – I didn’t really fully believe it myself, at the job interview, though the magic worked as advertised<\/em><\/a> in my own hands. (The field has since taken off, with Big American Labs stepping in – the sorts of labs that people believe automatically given the same evidence.)<\/p>\n \nHaving recently finished writing Experimental Heart<\/em><\/a>, I started thinking that it would make an interesting premise for a second novel if someone like me – a new employee from outside – got hired by a company like this and accidentally discovered that the whole scientific premise behind the company was fatally flawed. Who would she tell? Would people believe her? Would employees with a financial stake in the company try to suppress her findings? What if she was romantically entangled with one of these stakeholders – how would that effect her choice to go public or keep schtum? <\/p>\n \nLater, when my own company went under (due to shareholder squabbling, not scientific mishap), I was on the dole in Amsterdam and had the chance to write that novel: The Honest Look<\/em>. And on 19 November of this year, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press will publish<\/a> it<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A little over ten years ago, I left academia to work in a small start-up biotech company on a rural industrial park in the Netherlands. I can hardly believe so much time has passed: memories of my first day are … Continue reading