Pam lost her train of thought when someone knocked loudly on her office door. Now what? Writing a grant proposal was hard enough without interruptions.

But her annoyance faded when she turned to see Holly with a big smile, green eyes gleaming.

“You have to come see this. I think we’ve got something big!”

This wasn’t the usual calm and collected Holly. Pam followed her down the hall to the lab, where Holly took her straight to the microscope on the back bench. Several dishes of cultured brain cells were waiting and Holly put one under the scope.

“Look at these first. They’re cells that were triggered to start producing Alzheimer’s plaque. You can see the plaques have formed and the cells are beginning to die.”

Looking through the microscope, Pam saw the culture was filled with dark clumps of Alzheimer’s plaque surrounded by shriveled up, dying cells.

“Now look at these. They were treated with one of our test compounds, 40492.”

Holly handed Pam a second culture dish.

Pam looked through the microscope and did a double take. There were no plaques, no dying cells. Just healthy cells, like those in a normal brain. She felt a rush of excitement. This could be it! She tightened her grip on the microscope. Stay calm, professional.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “Could this be some kind of mistake?”

“It’s no mistake. I’ve repeated this five times now, and it gets even better. Look at this.”

Pam watched Holly reach for her laptop, surprised that she’d done so many repeats without sharing the results. She wondered what was coming next.

“The culture you just looked at shows what happens when I add the drug while the brain cells are still healthy, before they start to produce plaques,” Holly said. “Once I saw those results, I went on to see what would happen if I added the drug after plaques had already started to form, like in a patient with early stage Alzheimer’s.”

Holly turned on her computer and showed Pam a series of photos. “The series starts right when the cells have been triggered to start producing plaques. After that, I took pictures daily.”

The cells looked normal at first. But within three or four days, the photos showed plaques beginning to form and the cells starting to degenerate, resembling the early stages of Alzheimer’s when it might first be diagnosed.

Holly pointed to a picture taken on day four. “This is when I added the drug.”

The subsequent photos showed that the plaques stopped growing and gradually started to disappear. Within another few days, the plaques were gone and the cultures looked normal again.

Pam sat up with a start. “My God, Holly, this is amazing! If it works like this in people, this drug could reverse early stage Alzheimer’s. Although going from the culture dish to the clinic is a big step.”

Holly looked up with a smile. “We even have a break there. I checked it out and the drug you’re looking at has already been tried in humans as a cancer treatment. It didn’t work very well against cancer, but it’s all set to go for animal experiments and even clinical trials.”

Pam could hardly believe it. Got it! The drug I’ve been after for years. Her eyes filled with tears of joy as she jumped up and gave Holly a hug.

“This is fabulous! You’ve certainly followed things through. I can’t believe you kept your cool long enough to do all this before telling me. Does anyone else know? I assume you’ve got George involved in this too.”

“Actually, I’ve done it on my own. It seemed like such a great story that I kept wanting to flesh it out before I told everyone. I just couldn’t wait to do the next experiment!”

Pam was taken aback. This was supposed to be a joint project, and George didn’t even know what Holly was working on? Still, she didn’t want to argue with success.

“Well, you’ve certainly put it together,” she said. “Time to share, though. How about I call a special lab meeting for tomorrow morning at ten? You can present your results, and then we can talk about what we need to do to get this ready for publication. This is going to turn the world on its head!”

Pam watched her return the dishes to the incubator, feeling almost giddy with triumph. Except for the question nagging at the back of her mind.

Why had Holly waited so long to say anything?