Enrique DeSilva sighed and leaned back from his desk, wishing the burdensome file in front of him would just go away. Another tenure dossier, filled with a detailed accounting of the successes and failures of one of the Langmere’s junior faculty members. And however he looked at it, the successes were simply too thin. The process of tenure evaluation involved the work of several faculty committees. But the ultimate decision was in his hands and the burden of denying tenure, cutting off the career of a young scientist, was not something he enjoyed. But his duty was to the institution, and he only granted tenure to the very best. This candidate was a good scientist, but he hadn’t made the kind of major discoveries DeSilva wanted to see at the Langmere. He signed off his decision to deny tenure. Not without regret, but satisfied that it was the right thing to do.

The next major item on his agenda was preparing for a meeting with the Langmere Board of Directors that evening, when he wanted to convince the board to launch a major new fundraising campaign. But before that, his calendar said he had a meeting scheduled at three o’clock with Pamela Weller, who’d asked to meet with him about her research. She’d been at the Langmere for a little over four years and had just gone through her mid-tenure review. It didn’t look particularly promising and he wasn’t sure what he could do to help.

• • •

Pam was a nervous wreck as she got into the elevator and pressed the button for the twentieth floor, which was entirely occupied by administrative offices, including the Director’s. Perhaps she should have sent an email instead of asking for this meeting. She’d heard that DeSilva didn’t normally meet with junior faculty, except when he was considering their tenure cases. And those meetings weren’t often pleasant. DeSilva had the reputation of being a tough judge of those under him. Now that she was here, she wondered if requesting this meeting had been such a smart move.

The elevator door opened and she found herself facing an administrative assistant in the Director’s front office. “I have an appointment with Dr. DeSilva,” she said, wishing she were somewhere else.

Pam sat on one of the chairs in the reception area and several minutes passed before she was ushered into the Director’s office. She was struck by its size and opulence. It had to be at least a thousand square feet. Nearly as big as my whole lab. The two outside walls were floor-to-ceiling glass with breathtaking views of downtown Boston. The interior walls were covered with fine-grained oak paneling, with a built-in bookcase on one wall and a substantial piece of Impressionist art on the other. Pam didn’t know much about art, but she was pretty sure it was worth several years of her salary. Or all I need to pay for my mice. Next to it hung a family portrait, showing a much younger DeSilva with his wife and two children. And then there was a portrait of a young woman, probably mid-twenties, formally dressed and playing a cello. DeSilva’s daughter?

The Director sat at an inlaid mahogany desk in the corner between the windows. His silver gray hair was cut stylishly short and he was wearing an expensive-looking navy blue suit. Pam was glad she’d dressed in something besides jeans for the occasion. Wool slacks, silk blouse, and a charcoal blazer. Even the pearl necklace her mother had given her.

DeSilva was focused on a computer screen, so Pam took a deep breath and walked across the oversized oriental carpet, past a large conference table on her right, and a comfortable-looking seating area with an upholstered couch and armchairs on her left. When she reached his desk, DeSilva stood up to greet her and motioned her to a chair across from him.

“What can I do for you?” he asked. “I understand you made this appointment to talk about your research, so I took a look at your mid-tenure review for some background. Is there something in there that you’d like to discuss? I’m happy to help if I can.”

Pam was surprised. Despite what she’d heard, he seemed pleasant enough.

“No, that’s not it,” she said. “We’ve actually made a big jump since then that I wanted to tell you about.”

He looked at her quizzically. “I see.”

“It’s good news. It looks like we’ve found the Alzheimer’s drug we’ve been looking for.”

DeSilva gave her a half-smile but raised his eyebrows skeptically. “Really? That certainly would be big. Tell me about it.”

Pam held up her laptop. “Let me show you our results. It’ll be clearer that way.”

He got up and led Pam to the conference table. “Okay, let’s sit over here so we can both see your data.”

It took Pam only a few minutes to show him Holly’s results with 40492. She felt his skepticism evaporate and excitement mount with each experiment. When she finished, he sat back and smiled.

“This certainly is impressive, thank you for bringing it to me. I’m delighted to see data like this.”

Pam started to relax. “Thank you, Dr. DeSilva. I’m grateful for your interest.”

“Not at all, sharing your discovery is a great pleasure for me. Indeed, seeing something like this happen on my watch is the real reason to be director of an institution like this. And please, I’m Enrique. May I call you Pamela?”

“Oh, thank you, Enrique. My friends call me Pam.”

“Then so will I. Now, let’s talk about your next steps. As impressive as your results are, so far you’ve only shown that the drug works in culture. Are you planning to move on to animal experiments?”

“Yes, of course,” Pam said. “And that’s partly why I needed to talk to you. I’d like to do those experiments as quickly as possible in genetically engineered mice that develop Alzheimer’s. The drug’s already been used in mice, so we have the basic starting information to set it up. But the Alzheimer’s mice are expensive, over two hundred dollars each, and we need to test a lot of different drug doses and delivery schedules. If we bred the mice and did the experiments in several steps we could do the project for maybe forty or fifty thousand, but that would take at least a year, probably more. The alternative is to set up a really big experiment where we test all the variables at once. That would take a lot more mice, but we could probably get the answers in three months or less. The problem is the cost would be somewhere around four hundred thousand, and I can’t afford it. So I came here hoping you’d think this is important enough to go all out. And that you could help fund it.”

DeSilva hesitated before responding. “That’s a lot of money, not the kind of sum I usually pass out to help junior faculty with their research. But I have to agree, what you have could be big. And fortunately, I have the resources to do this. So yes, figure out how to proceed in the best possible way and go for it.”

Pam started to thank him, but DeSilva waved a hand and interrupted.

“No need to thank me. But let’s think further ahead. I’m confident that you’ll get these mouse experiments to work, right?”

“Yes,” Pam replied with a smile. “They’ll work. And as soon as they do, I’ll get a major paper submitted to Nature.”

“Good, that’s the right place for you to publish this. But you’re not forgetting the patent application, are you?”

Actually, Pam hadn’t thought about applying for a patent. She was totally focused on finishing her experiments and publishing the results.

“I’ve never done a patent application before. I was planning to work on that after we got the paper published,” she said.

“It has to be the other way around. In order to protect the Langmere’s rights to this, we need to file a patent application before you submit your paper or even talk about your work in a public lecture. And it’s important that we do this right. Your drug will bring a great deal of money to the Langmere, and a hefty share of that will come back to you as well. Does the compound belong to one of the companies that contributed to our library? Whoever gave it to us will share handsomely in the profit. In fact, if it’s from a pharmaceutical company, we should just ask them for the money you need to finish the project.”

Pam looked at the painting on his wall before answering. She didn’t want to get money from a drug company, and she wasn’t sure how to handle this without offending him.

DeSilva followed her gaze. “Nice, isn’t it?”

Pam smiled. “Beautiful, although I have to confess I don’t know much about art.”

He laughed. “No, I meant the portrait of my daughter. That’s her at a concert with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She’s a cellist.”

“Oh, that is nice!” Pam said.

“Yes, I’m quite proud of her. Anyway, about the compound?”

“Right,” Pam said. “It’s a failed cancer drug that belongs to a pharmaceutical company. But that’s all I know about it because I don’t want anyone to say that whoever owns the compound influenced our work. We have all the information we need for our experiments, and if we don’t identify the drug until the end, nobody can accuse us of bias. So I’ve wanted to be safe, but I’m happy to identify it now if you think we should.”

DeSilva pursed his lips and looked down at the table. Pam wondered if he was balancing the money with the ethics of drug company involvement. Finally he nodded. “Four hundred thousand is a hefty price for avoiding the drug company. But you’re right. It’s worth it to keep this clean.”

Pam smiled to herself at the look of respect in the Director’s eyes. “I’m glad you think we’ve done this right. I don’t have any funding from pharmaceutical companies either. All of my research is supported by government grants, so there aren’t any conflicts of interest. As long as you agree then, we’ll wait until we’re ready to publish before we see what the drug is.”

“Yes, I believe that’s a wise course to follow. So here’s what we’ll do. I’ll establish an open account to cover your mice. I’ll also have our lawyers draft the patent application so you won’t have to spend time on that. Once the paper’s ready, they can reach out to the pharmaceutical company and work with them on the filing. The company will already have patented the compound, but we can patent its new use as an Alzheimer’s drug.”

“Thank you, I hardly know what to say.”

“No need to thank me, this is important for the Langmere as well as for you. You realize this could well be Nobel Prize stuff, don’t you?”

“Well, I guess maybe,” Pam said.

DeSilva smiled at her. “No maybe about it, you know that. Is there any competition in your field that we need to worry about?”

Pam shook her head. “I don’t think so. We’re the only ones who’ve developed the cell culture system for large-scale screening, and that’s given us a huge advantage. Others labs, even the really big ones like Eric Prescott’s, can only test a few compounds at a time in mice.”

“Good,” DeSilva said. “And are you confident that everyone in your lab knows to keep this to themselves? It seems like the only danger would be if the identity of the drug leaked out and one of your competitors tried to steal it.”

“No worries,” Pam assured him. “I emphasized that at lab meeting and everyone’s on board. And anyway, nobody knows what the drug is except the postdoc who did the experiments I showed you.”