Dead End

Five

The eventual establishment of Dubette’s pharmacogenomics unit took a further month and a half. The secretarial choice remained Parnell’s but, having gone through a similar process himself, he should objectively have known the choice would be decided not by him alone but by a filleting committee composed of himself, Dwight Newton, Russell Benn, Wayne Denny, company lawyer Peter Baldwin and the deputy head of the budgetary division.

Parnell’s budget was sufficient for a scientific staff of six, with a review after a year. His rejection of five candidates as underqualified was supported by the selection panel. The strongest argument against his choice of the one woman applicant came from Russell Benn, who insisted she was too inexperienced, having only graduated from medical school three years earlier. It took Parnell an hour to win a majority decision in Beverley Jackson’s favour, arguing her graduation pass was the highest of any applicant, that she’d already risen to joint deputy of the genetics research department at Johns Hopkins and published two respected scientific journal papers on the genetics links with drug research. Two of the other applicants, one from Los Angeles’ Cedars of Lebanon hospital, the other from the research department at Harvard Medical School, had also published impressively on the genome project. Ted Lapidus, a fourth applicant and the oldest candidate, with specialized experience in his native Athens before moving from Greece to the George Washington Hospital in DC, actually questioned one of Parnell’s own published opinions.

‘Which is a pretty good way of talking yourself out of a job,’ opened Newton, in the after-interview analysis.

‘I want a man with that sort of confidence,’ contradicted Parnell.

‘He probably sees himself taking over your job,’ warned Benn.

‘Then he’s going to work like hell, isn’t he?’ replied Parnell. ‘I want that, too.’

Parnell’s longest theoretical scientific discussion about applying genetics to drug development came with Deke Pulbrow, another Johns Hopkins University candidate. For almost forty-five minutes the two men conducted a debate that more than proved to Parnell’s satisfaction that Pulbrow had a much broader and deeper understanding of pharmacogenomics than had been obvious in the journal publication that Parnell had found disappointing. Not once did Newton or Benn intrude a comment or offer an opinion.

Parnell was surprised at Newton’s luncheon invitation to a log-framed inn in the North Virginia countryside, not the Dubette commissary, the day after they made their final selection.

‘I want us to get along,’ declared the research and development director, at the bar. The thin man was drinking mineral water. Parnell chose gin.

‘So do I,’ said Parnell. He was already getting a deja vu echo from this conversation – deja vu upon deja vu, in fact.

‘You really believe you can map a genetically matched responder to a genetically acceptable drug, cutting out all the rejection?’

‘Not all,’ acknowledged Parnell, realistically. ‘A lot, hopefully.’

‘How much is a lot?’

‘I can’t give an estimate, not yet.’

‘Ball-park figure?’ pressed Newton.

‘I’d be satisfied with fifty per cent.’

‘Matching fifty per cent of effective drugs to responsive patients?’ persisted Newton.

Parnell didn’t hurry his reply. Matching responsive drugs to responsive patients was the very science of pharmacogenomics. Which Newton – which none of them – should have needed explaining. So why was Newton demanding just that? ‘I don’t think I could aim higher. Who knows?’

‘So, you fit an acceptable drug to a genetically accepting patient, you knock two or three – four maybe – other drugs from a cocktail administration…’ Newton paused as if seeking an example. ‘AIDS or hepatitis, for instance?’

When the waiter came with the menu, Parnell ordered another gin and tonic and chose scrod. Newton took the same, impatient with the interruption.

‘AIDS or hepatitis,’ prompted the research director, when the waiter left.

‘If we get the match right, we won’t need the two or three or four others,’ stated Parnell, flatly.

‘So, we lose fifty per cent of the sale of two or three or four other drugs!’

‘I said it was an estimate. Maybe I won’t get that high.’ There was an obvious direction to this conversation, Parnell recognized.

‘Let’s use it,’ urged Newton. ‘You start reducing drug multiplication by fifty per cent, you’re talking of a lot less drugs being prescribed for a hell of a lot of conditions. You understand what I’m saying?’

‘I understand that it’s your business…’ Parnell stopped, to correct himself. ‘My business now… Dubette’s business… to sell drugs. That it’s a commercial operation. But I don’t believe there’d be a dramatic financial fall if I’m anywhere near successful. Which I stress I’ve no guarantee of being, in either the short or long term. My specialized science is still very experimental. What, for instance, if we slot one of the unnecessary cocktail medicines into a condition where it’s properly effective? You get an increase, not a decrease, in sales. To the commercial benefit of Dubette and the medical benefit of the patients taking it. Everyone’s a winner.’

‘You can’t guarantee that.’

Parnell felt the irritation rising. ‘I can’t guarantee anything. Except, by a compensatory measure, an increase in the sales of one matched drug more than making up for any loss from the reduced sales of another.’

‘What did you think of Barbara Spacey’s psychological assessment?’

The profile had come in the middle of the first of the interminable selection weeks. The psychologist described him as independently minded, verging upon overconfidence, with a predilection to decide upon – and follow – his own opinions and judgements over those of others. It was, she’d judged, a tendency that could, in fact, lead to misjudgements. Her conclusion was that he should be encouraged to share and discuss his work throughout the research division.

Parnell said: ‘Seemed to jar a few chords.’

‘That’s what worries me,’ conceded Newton.

‘You’ve lost me,’ complained Parnell.

‘You’re not here to jar things,’ said Newton, throwing Parnell’s word back at him. ‘You start a programme you think has got potential but which might detrimentally affect one of our existing products, I want to know about it. In fact I want to be kept fully up to speed on everything you do, on every programme you and your new staff embark on. No independent-mindedness, OK?’

‘Of course you’ll know what I’m doing,’ said Parnell, which wasn’t the undertaking Newton had demanded.

The waiter told them their table was ready and as they made their way towards it Newton said: ‘A guy can live very comfortably at Dubette. You remember the president’s salary-review promise at the seminar?’

‘Yes?’ said Parnell, questioningly.

‘It’s going to be ten per cent. You haven’t even started to work properly yet and your salary has already gone up ten per cent.’

Parnell dismissed what had clearly been a conformity warning from Dwight Newton, just as he’d dismissed the much earlier but virtually identical conversation with Russell Benn. But not contemptuously. Both job-dependent men were overlooking how long it might take – years, potentially – genetically to refine a drug cocktail to a single constituent dosage. Until that happened it wasn’t a personal consideration, if indeed it would ever become one. He was concerned with his science and its beneficial use, not the price on the label.

Parnell had had time on his hands during the appointments hiatus and, partially to fill it, established a rigid fitness schedule at the health centre. By the end of the month he’d dropped almost 10 lb, most of it, he was sure, excess stomach flab. When he ate lunch with Rebecca he swapped salt-beef sandwiches for salads and after three days she started to do the same and complained that she’d picked him out for sex, not healthy eating. In the comparable period she lost 3 lb.

Their relationship settled to both their satisfaction, although it was Rebecca who occasionally insisted that it remained only a relationship, with no binding commitments. They spent most weekends together, more often at his more central apartment than at Bethesda, where she rented a small clapboard house with a garden, which turned out to be her hobby. Parnell helped on the occasions they did stay there, but strictly under her direction after killing a long-established honeysuckle climber he believed himself to be pruning.

The honeysuckle mistake occurred on the final sixth week, and he took her withdrawal as annoyance at his gardening stupidity. Finally he said: ‘If you want me to say it again, I’m sorry I cut your flowering thing down. I’ll buy you another to replace it.’

‘What?’ asked Rebecca. They were in the lounge of the Bethesda cottage, littered with the fallout of the Sunday newspapers.

‘You haven’t said more than four words since I cut the honeysuckle down.’

‘It’s not the fucking honeysuckle!’

The vehemence startled him. He came forward towards her and said: ‘Hey! What’s the problem here?’

‘There’s something odd happening.’

‘At Dubette?’ They couldn’t dodge it all the time – when he’d told her of the psychological assessment, she’d mocked that it was totally right, that he was an arrogant son of a bitch – but most of the time they avoided talking about the firm.

She nodded, saying nothing.

‘What, for Christ’s sake!’

‘I told you I don’t know!’

‘Rebecca, you’re not making a lot of sense! You want to talk about it, I want to listen. But talk in words I can understand.’

Rebecca straightened in her chair, forcing herself out of her reverie. ‘There’s some stuff coming in… stuff I’m not being allowed to assess and pass on up the line.’

‘You’re being sidelined?’

Rebecca shook her head. ‘It’s bypassing my line manager, too. It’s divisional director to Dwight Newton… we wouldn’t have known it was even happening except for a misdirected email, asking for confirmation that it had arrived. Which didn’t tell us anything but sent Newton into apeshitting cartwheels.’

‘So, it’s not personal?’ persisted Parnell.

‘It’s never happened before: not since I’ve been in the division.’

‘Relax. There’s got to be a hundred reasons why things go between sub-director to God himself, without going the normal route.’

‘It’s never happened before!’ Rebecca insisted.

‘I heard you the first time.’

‘The email came from Paris.’

‘So?’ said Parnell.

‘Haven’t you wondered what our ultimate God, Edward C. Grant himself, meant at the seminar about a way to prevent our products being reverse-analysed, for cheaper manufacture?’

‘I am now,’ said Parnell.