Chapter 1

My name is Madison Monroe, but everyone calls me Maddie. I am 25 years old and a pharmaceutical engineer. I have a PhD, which makes me a doctor, though I only use my title when I'm submitting a research paper. It is also on the entrance to my lab.

In case you don't know, a pharmaceutical engineer designs new drugs. I graduated from the university a year ago, and was immediately hired by Moore Pharmaceuticals in San Antonio, TX, where I am being paid an obscene amount of money, most of which is going to pay off my student loans.

In college, I became a lesbian. My dorm roommate in my freshman year, named Thelma, made me realize how much better sex with a girl was, compared to a guy. Girl sex can go on for hours, escalating to ever increasing levels of ecstasy. With a guy, sex lasts a few minutes, followed by waiting for him to get it up again.

Thelma made me face my true nature, not what my parents wanted me to be. When I started college, I was so uptight, wanting to be the perfect girl. Thelma said that I had a stick up my ass that went all the way up my spine. With more than a little trickery and coercion on her part, she removed that stick, and turned me into my true self.

My parents, I still haven't told. They have so many hopes and expectations, including me getting married and having children. I am their only daughter. I know when I "come out" to them I will break their hearts, so I keep putting it off. When they ask when I will start dating, I use the excuse of being so busy at work. Soon I will have to tell them.

Anyway, I was hired by Moore to work on a new approach on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or OCD for short. If you've seen the movie "As Good As It Gets," starring Jack Nicholson, you've seen someone with OCD. In the movie, he was shackled by ritual. He would lock and unlock his front door three times before locking it. He wouldn't step on cracks on the sidewalk (I guess he didn't want to break his mother's back). That, and some of his other personality disorders, made him very hard to live with.

Believe it or not, that character had a mild case. Some people are so afraid of doing the wrong thing or not performing the right ritual, they have trouble getting out of bed, let alone holding down a job. Almost all the victims of this disease are people who have discovered that there are some things in life that are beyond their control. They have built up rituals or superstitions that help mitigate their fears. That old rhyme of "step on a crack, break you mother's back" is a fairly common one. Some otherwise normal people have that one.

Anyway, I had come up with a novel approach for treating OCD in my doctoral thesis. It is very technical, and Moore now owns the patent for the process, so I can't really talk about it. But the upshot is I think I may have found a cure for OCD, not just a treatment that has to be taken daily.

Doing testing on the drug was tricky. Other animals don't have OCD, but I did test the drug on mice and then monkeys. There were no ill side effects. When I dissected them, there were no signs of tumors or any other biologic abnormalities.

When I ran trials on actual OCD sufferers, the results were better than I could have possibly dreamed. They took the pill, which is called Tribopine, or TBP for short, after a half hour, they tried to do whatever their OCD is preventing them from doing. Every time, the compulsion was gone. They could walk down a sidewalk without worrying about stepping on a crack; they could sit down without circling the chair three times; etc. The gratitude on their face was the best reward I could imagine. Checking back a few days later, none of the compulsions had returned.

Some of them begged for another dose. There were some symptoms they had forgotten about. I had to refuse. There were strict rules set up by the FDA when you are running trials. You break the rules and it could derail approval. I told them that I'd get them more when the drug was approved.

My superior, owner of the company, Martin Moore, called me into his office. I was only a few weeks away from getting FDA approval. Everything was going so well. No adverse side effects or allergic reactions could be found to Tribopine. As far as FDA approvals went, this was a cake walk.

My boss was in his 60's. He has graying brown hair and was a nice guy. When the secretary let me in, I knew something was wrong, by the pained look on his face. "Maddie, come in," he said.

I decided to cut to the chase. "Is there a problem, sir?"

"I'm afraid that we're going to have to suspend your work on Tribopine."

I was flabbergasted. "What? Why?"

He patted me on my arm. "It's nothing you've done. Your research and discovery of this compound has been exemplary. It's the nature of the drug."

I decided that yelling at my boss would do no good, not until he'd finished his explanation.

"I think I have all the facts. Correct me if I have anything wrong. TBP is a one dose drug."

I nodded. "That's right. When the OCD sufferer takes it, a 'switch', so to speak, is thrown in his brain. This makes the behaviors he obsesses over, go away. As long as he tries his behaviors while the drug is active, approximately eight hours, he will be cured."

"Is there any way you could dilute the pill, so it would require multiple dosages?"

This confused me. "No. Like I said, TBP sets off a chemical reaction that eliminates the compulsions. Either you have enough of the drug in you to set off the reaction or you don't. There's no half ways about it."

My boss raised his finger. "And there's the rub. The process to make Tribopine is quite involved, am I right?"

"That's right."

"So we have an expensive drug that will be of use to about five hundred chronic sufferers in the United States..."

"And another ten thousand that are marginally functional."

"Still, what are we going to charge for this drug?"

This aspect had not occurred to me. If I had a couple more of years of experience, it probably would have. "I don't know."

"To cover the costs of research and production, and make a two percent profit, we would need to charge over $5,000 per pill."

"But insurance..."

"Some may cover such a specialized drug, but most won't, for such a rare disorder."

"That price will exclude at least half of the potential customers. That drives the price even higher."

A knot formed in my stomach. "I understand."

"It is better for our books if we say TBP as a failed drug. Our budget covers that. It doesn't cover drugs that work too well."

I turned to leave the office, but he stopped me by grabbing my arm. "This is the first time anything like this has ever happened, at any company I've heard of. I want you to know, that regardless of what our ledger says, your work here is not a failure. The chemical reaction in the brain, that you discovered, will no doubt be used in future psychotropic drugs. As a matter of fact, that's what I want you to work on next. Find other applications of this process. Maybe it can be used on bipolars or other psychotics.""

Still numb from the shock, I just nodded and left. I needed to talk to Beth.

Dr. Elizabeth "Beth" Brooks is my best friend at work. Her lab is next to mine. She has been at Moore for only a year longer than me, but her advice on handling company politics was always helpful.

She was technically a chemical engineer, but that's just because the university she went to didn't have the separate title. All her graduate work involved pharmaceuticals. She was as much a PE as I was.

She was only an inch taller than me, had brown hair and hazel eyes; as opposed to my brown hair and brown eyes. Some people say we look like sisters, but I don't see it. We have similar hair, but her nose is longer than mine, and her face is oval in shape, as opposed to my heart-shaped one.

She had a fantastic body; large breasts, a narrow waist, and wide hips. If she weren't so arrow-straight, I'd be all over her. But she was a Mormon, with a fiancé that is on a yearlong missionary trip to somewhere in Africa. Why are all the good ones straight?

I have never told her about my orientation. It would just create awkwardness between us.

Beth was exiting her office, as I was walking down the hall. She could see that I was not happy. "Maddie, what's wrong?"

"Dr. Moore just canceled my project."

"On TBP? How can he? It works so well."

"It's involved. The thing that really stinks is, I totally understand the reasoning behind it."

She hugged me. "Let me take you out to lunch. That was where I was headed. We can talk it over there."

We went over to Wendy's, which was across the street from our building. We both got a salad. We ate, as I told Beth my tale of woe.

When I got to the part where Dr. Moore gave me a new assignment, Beth said, "I don't think you have to make a new drug, just find another use the one you have."

This perked me up. "What do you mean?"

"Well, take Viagra; it was originally designed as a blood thinner for people with high blood pressure. It turned out to not work as well as other medicines that were already on the market. But when they discovered an unusual side effect mentioned by several men, that was when a new use was discovered, one that ended up making the company a lot of money."

"So you're saying that I should check the test subjects for side effects."

"Exactly."

"But that was one of the great things about Tribopine. There were no side effects."

"Go over them again. There may be something you missed."

So I did. Going over the list of trial subjects I didn't see anything, until I reached subject "G". He was a young man who was compelled to wash himself for a half hour anytime someone touched him. Against all odds, he had a girlfriend, with which he had been working with to get over his OCD, with limited results. When he we took TBP, he not only intentionally touched his girlfriend for the first time, he also lost his virginity.

When I checked his background, it said that he was a devout Roman Catholic. This was different. Subject "G" not only lost his OCD, he also lost a major part of his morals. When we asked how he felt afterwards, he started to tear up. He said that he was grateful and felt a whole new world had been opened up to him. No sign of remorse, or guilt over breaking one of God's commandments.

Could TBP not only get rid of compulsions but also lower inhibitions? When you think about it, people with OCD are probably the most inhibited people in the world. Everything they do is thought out and judged by themselves, as to whether a certain action is allowed.

Looking back at the normal test subjects, none of the questions we asked them had to do with their sex life while on the drug. That may have been a mistake.

Now, how to test my hypotheses? Well, since there were virtually no side effects, I could use them on anyone.