Knockout Mouse (13 page)

“It’s a tough break.” This was Dugan. “Extraordinarily bad luck. This kind of thing doesn’t happen very often, does it doctor?”

“It’s rare. It takes the right—or wrong—mix of circumstances.”

“Yes. She had an adrenaline injection with her, but apparently it spoiled. What would cause that?”

“Heat. Time.”

“We don’t know how long she would have lasted anyway,” Dugan said.

There was a pause. “Meaning—?”

“I don’t suppose it matters now. Well, I should get back, too.”

“Busy time for us.”

“More than I’d like. Why did you tell the board we’re ready to start Phase I on MC124?”

“Simple. We are. The IND determination is due back from the FDA on Friday. That’ll clear the way to start testing it on human subjects.”

“Yes. But wait for it. The chief hasn’t signed off yet.”

“The results are solid. I’m the scientist, Neil.”

“But it’s my job to verify. There’s some loose data floating around. I think you know that.”

“It’s nothing to worry about. An anomaly. There’s one—many—in every program.”

“I hope you’re right. I hope it has magically disappeared, because I can’t undo your announcement.” Dugan cleared his throat. “Tell me, what’s your theory on what happened to this girl?”

“It looks pretty straightforward.” McKinnon paused. “Unless you know something you’re not telling me.”

More silence. “There’s plenty I don’t tell you, Frederick. You do not have the same privilege. I’m the COO. You answer to me. If there are
any
red flags on MC124, you must write them up. Human trials will not commence until we’re sure. We
will
put a hold on the program if necessary. No matter what it costs the company in the short run.”

“The big pharma money is ready to come in, Neil. They’ve been knocking down the door.”

“Oh, I know. I keep an eye on you. But I’m warning you—don’t make any premature moves. We have to do this right.”

“You don’t actually want to see this fly, do you? You’d be happy if I just went away. Oh, but don’t forget to leave behind
the science that started this company. Look, if you don’t step lightly, I
will
leave. And I’ll take the program with me.”

Dugan chuckled. “We want your program to succeed. Very much. There’s no rivalry here, Frederick. We all know what it would do for the company. Pave the way for the IPO. The biggest monoclonal breakthrough in years.”

“And I think you have a problem with that. With the credit I’ll get.”

Another laugh. “No, I’ve only got a problem with the huge crater you’ll leave if you’re wrong.”

“On the contrary, I think you might enjoy it. As long as it’s my crater, not yours.”

“It’s the
company’s
crater, doctor. That’s my sole concern. This is not a lab experiment you can throw out if it goes wrong. We have obligations. You take the risks in science. We take the risks in business. That’s what we were brought in for.”

McKinnon’s voice, under control to this point, turned angry. “You want to know how safe MC124 is? I’ll demonstrate. I’ll inject it myself. Would that satisfy you?”

Dugan laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You just proved to me how little you know about the field, Neil. It’s an old tradition. My team will administer it to ourselves. It won’t give us results on the target, of course, but it
will
address toxicology. That all right with you, Mr. Dugan?”

“Be my guest.”

“Thank
you for your permission. I guarantee the effects will be negligible.
Guarantee
it.”

“Nothing would make me happier. But one more thing. Don’t broadcast it up and down the industry. Your announcement of MC124 at the medical conference in San Diego was unacceptable.”

“It’s my work. My call when to publish.”

“I understand you’re giving Doug top billing on the paper.”

“Christ, Neil, does your snooping never stop? This program has turned LifeScience into a money magnet. We could become the next Genentech. What exactly is your complaint?”

“True, the product will be huge—if it works. True, it has attracted investors, short term. Our pipeline is filling up. But if MC124 fails, if there’s a problem, the damage to the company in the long run will be equally huge. With so much at stake, we don’t need the backdoor tactics you pulled with the board. Never do that again, Dr. McKinnon.”

The clump of footsteps followed. This must have been when McKinnon came out on the porch. The rest of the tape was room noise, then the skittering of the mike being reeled in.

I clicked off the recorder. Somehow I felt better. Other people’s problems can do that for you. I was less inclined now to drive off, at least not without speaking to Jenny. More inclined than ever to find out what was really going on at LifeScience.

That meant I’d have to play my Gregory Alton card. I thought back to my day of shooting with Rita at Kumar Biotechnics yesterday. Gregory had been lurking in the parking lot late in the afternoon. We watched him from Kumar’s window. By the time we packed up, though, Gregory was gone.

I finished stowing the DAT recorder in the briefcase and went back inside. Jenny’s door was closed. Taking a nap, maybe. She’d slept poorly the past two nights. We’d gotten up while it was still dark on Monday morning to go to her office and scan Sheila’s journal. I didn’t know how big a force Dugan had following us, but no one appeared to be on duty at that hour. Once we had the diary digitized, we could produce copies at will. I instructed Jenny to package up the two photocopies we had
and mail them to the police, just so Dugan couldn’t get us on that one.

I went to the dining room and called Rita to make sure work had gone all right today, since I’d been replaced by the new DP. She described it as splendid. “Best DP I ever had,” she said.

“Ha ha. Well, I’ll be in to check on you tomorrow. Will you put those items I left with you in the camera case?”

“No problem,” Rita said. She still had the zip disks and the tape of Sheila in the parking lot. The security of my flat and of my jeep were questionable, and I trusted her as much as anyone to keep them safe. “I need the HD cassette, though, so I’ll transfer it to video for you.”

“Thanks a lot.”

I called Wes next. He wasn’t happy about what I wanted him to arrange for tomorrow night, but he couldn’t turn me down.

Then I dug Gregory Alton’s card out of my billfold. I hated doing this. I tried to block out the image of his smug blond mug on the other end of the line.

“Hello, Gregory. It’s Bill.”

“Bill! Where were you today, buddy?” Apparently he didn’t mind admitting he was stalking me.

“I had to go to a funeral.”

“Oh, gee. I hope it wasn’t anyone—”

“How much do you actually know about LifeScience, Gregory? Did you know a researcher named Sheila Harros?”

“Not specifically. But I can bring you up to speed on the company. I’ve had a few meetings. Scoped them out, got some juicy confidentials. If, that is, you can—”

“Yeah, yeah. I know what you want. Okay, you got a deal. I want to see you tomorrow. You’ll tell me about LifeScience.”

“And you’ll bring some goodies for me.”

“Hold on. I missed today’s shoot, you know. I don’t have the footage. Give me another day or two on the job.”

“Whoa, whoa, Bill. This isn’t what I call even-Steven.”

“You’re going to go first, Gregory. That’s the way it is.”

I heard just enough of a pause. “Why should that be?”

“You need what I’ve got more than the other way around. That’s the fact. I hate to be like this, but I’m going to be like this.”

He gave in with a knowing chuckle. “Film people are all about deals, aren’t they? Okay. I’ll give you the data dump on LifeScience. And by Friday you’ll give me what I need on Kumar.”

We agreed to meet for lunch. I hung up the phone and bounced onto the couch, feeling magically lighter. Pushing Gregory around had improved my mood even more than listening to Dugan and McKinnon duke it out.

Still, I was buying his information on credit. I didn’t know if I’d actually follow through on my end of the bargain. Kumar had been incredibly decent to us so far. I didn’t want to betray him. But I needed Gregory’s “juicy confidentials” right now, and I’d worry about paying the bill later.

I met Gregory Alton at Perry’s
in downtown Palo Alto on Thursday. What a difference a year had made. I had stopped even trying to come down here at the height of the boom. University Avenue traffic had stood still then, like a pipe clogged between Stanford at one end and Highway 101 at the other. Now I actually found a parking spot on my first pass. The sycamore trees along the avenue were curled a dusty yellow. I strolled the sidewalk without being knocked over by lines of marching MBAs. Attendants at the salons and spas loitered by their doors, wondering where they’d have to move for their next job.

I got a table right away. Once upon a time I would have waited outside, along with the mostly male clientele in their polos and striped shirts. Cell phones, PDAs, and laptops would have been arrayed on the blue-checked tablecloths like pieces on a chessboard, the buzz of electrons and venture capital in the air.

Gregory swaggered in and took a look around. “It’s a good thing biotech is happening, huh?” he said as he joined me. “Otherwise I’d probably be doing egregiously trivial sys admin for some corporate suit.” He said
suit
in a manner meant to imply he and I were brothers-in-arms. “And you’d be—what, shooting weddings?”

I ignored this. “You new to biotech?”

He shot me a sneaky grin. “I majored in computer science in college because I loved video games. Got an MBA so I could speak the tongue of the suits. I was in the first wave in South Park.” South Park was the epicenter of the Web boom in San Francisco. “Dude, in those days it was like a gumball machine. Put in a penny idea, turn the knob, and get a wad of cash. You jump on that?”

I gave a sort-of nod. I did get mesmerized by those candy colors, until I had to factor in consorting with the Gregorys of the world in order to turn the knob.

When the waiter came around, I ordered the Chinese chicken salad. Gregory didn’t look at the menu. “I’ll have the grilled ahi sandwich,” he said. “The tuna should be crisp, very crisp, on the outside, like bacon. Soft on the inside, like jelly, but not raw. And keep the capers off it, okay?”

His attention came back to me. “So you know the L curve. Big drop and now we’re bumping along the bottom. I give myself credit, though. Never promised eyeballs. Never made a B-to-C play.” He meant business-to-consumer. “I always got the quick flip, then slid over before any of my ventures turned up on
fuckedcompany.com
. I wasn’t going to be no dead man driving.”

“Dead man driving?”

“You know the guys. Instead of doing something smart with their severance, they buy a Jag. So they can look good driving to their nonexistent job interviews.”

“Keep looking like a big man, and maybe the world will treat you like one.”

“So anyway, this guy, my partner Ron, he clued me in on biotech as the next exponential industry. Guess who are some of the major individual investors? Bill, Paul, and Larry.”

He listed them on a first-name basis, as if the trio was as familiar as Moe, Curly, and Larry. Gates, Allen, and Ellison. “Curing disease must be hot,” I said.

“End users can ignore a banner ad. They can’t ignore cancer.”

“How did you get up to speed on molecular genetics?”

“Well, Ron’s got the bio side. I’ve got the information architecture. That’s our play, bioinformatics. We got cooking last year. Once the human genome was sequenced, boom! It’s a race to monetize the genome, just like the Internet.”

“Explain bioinformatics to me.”

“There are mega databases of genetic information out there. Somewhere in that galactic cloud is precisely the data a lab or pharma needs to define their disease target and test their drug candidate. We penetrate the cloud for them.”

“With some kind of specialized search engine?”

“It’s way more gnarly than that, Bill. We’ve got some proprietary code in the works. Let’s say you’re looking at a particular stretch of DNA. You’ve got an idea that it’s involved in, I don’t know, cancer of the cuticle. Now, this gene is maybe four thousand base pairs long. Base pairs are the rungs on the twisted ladder of DNA. They’re like a very long address. Now, people out there have researched what goes on at this address. They might be able to give you codons, receptors, promoters, protein sequence assembly—the kind of stuff you can use to design your drug. But that data is dispersed. All
you’ve
got is the address. It’s like having a house number, but you don’t know the street, you don’t even know the city. That’s where we come in. We use our tools to put you in touch with what everyone else can tell you about this address.”

The food came. Gregory lifted the top of his sandwich, inspected the ahi like an Olympic judge, then tore into it. I said, “And this is what your company wants to do for LifeScience.”

He showed me a chewing version of that smug smile of his. “Oh yeah, your buddies at LifeScience. What’s so fascinating about them anyway?”

“It’s a personal thing, Gregory. A friend of mine worked there.”

He took a gulp of soda and eventually got around to swallowing. “We’re playing for an alliance with LifeScience. They’ve got a new molecule that’s supposed to be monstrously effective against cancer. It’ll be in trials soon. It’s already bringing in big bucks for new programs. Their pipeline’s going to be stuffed. Meaning new targets, new drug candidates. We’ll help them find both. Later, if we grow like I think we can, we’ll test the candidates
in silico.
Find out what the compound does in various tissues, cell processes, metabolic pathways. All of these human functions are being modelled. The computer is the lab.”

“LifeScience is on the verge of going big time.”

“Yup. They’ve been up and down. The new cash machine is a monoclonal antibody. Their science guy, McKinnon, was big into them back when. Didn’t pan out. They were gasping for air, got some new management, a new target, and now they’ve got this hot candidate, MC124. McKinnon dropped the bomb at a med conference. Cheesed the crap out of his bosses. By the way, you heard none of this from me.”