Fatal Reaction

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