Ben put the papers for Satoshi on the corner of his desk, intending to give them to the researcher when he saw him, which he thought would be within the hour. Nine-thirty was Satoshi’s usual time of arrival, and Ben had no reason to believe it wouldn’t be as usual that morning. The only way he thought he might not see the man until afternoon would be if Satoshi had decided to indulge in some serious celebrating the previous night. From Ben’s trip to Japan to rescue the now-famous lab books, Ben knew what sake could do.
“Did you read that article?” Jacqueline questioned. She’d poked her head in from the neighboring office through the connecting door.
“I’m looking at it at the moment.”
“I think you’d better,” Jacqueline encouraged, “and before we sign the deal with Rapid Therapeutics up in Worcester, Massachusetts.”
“Oh?” Ben questioned. He didn’t like the sound of that. He and Carl Harris had been negotiating with Rapid Therapeutics over the course of many months to license their patents on increasing the efficiency of creating induced pluripotent stem cells. A deal was finally imminent, so there was no time to waste if something better was in the pipeline.
With his feet perched on the corner of the desk, Ben proceeded to read the article, realizing as he did so that Jacqueline was certainly correct. The article was about a small start-up company in California named iPS RAPID that had recently licensed a mechanism that dramatically raised by hundreds of times the efficiency of producing human induced pluripotent stem cells, a heretofore stumbling block in their use. The new technique involved what were termed small molecules.
Ben was shocked, not that the breakthrough was so astounding, although it was, but that it had gotten to the point of licensing without there even being a whisper of its discovery. Usually such an invention would first appear in Nature or Science, as its importance was obvious as a giant step in the direction of the commercialization of stem cells, but here it was showing up in an essentially unknown journal as a patented process already licensed, meaning that iPS USA was going to have to join the fray late and pay hundreds of times more to corner it. Although he was in a very real way adding to it, Ben recognized it was an unfortunate sign of the times. Universities now all had their own patent offices and considered filing for patents associated with the researchers’ work more important than the research itself, and the behavior was definitely slowing the progress of science. Before the patent mania, it was the immediate publication of advances that kept the investigative pot boiling. Of course, adding to the problem was the fact that government patent offices, both in the United States and Europe, were also granting patents for life processes, which they weren’t supposed to do by law, with Europe better than the United States in this regard. Ben could not believe some of the patents that he had recently seen emanating from the U.S. patent office. Often he marveled how anyone could justify a patent on a process that had developed by evolutionary forces over millions if not billions of years. The current patent mania would not only slow research but might also bring it to a halt. No one will be able to do anything without impinging on someone’s patent, which will result in ever more lawsuits, of which there were already enough today. Ben saw it as being akin to throwing sand into the gears of progress in medical research, a consequence that iPS USA was trying to avoid, at least in the arena of induced pluripotent stem cells.
“Put in a call to this iPS RAPID!” Ben called out to Jacqueline through the open connecting door. “You’re right about this article. Get the CEO’s name and get him on the line!”
Jacqueline’s head poked through the doorway, her red hair back-lit from the sun streaming into her office.
“Didn’t you notice that iPS RAPID is in San Diego, where it’s just after six in the morning?” Jacqueline said patiently.
For a moment Ben just stared at her without being able to make out her facial features in the glare. It took him a moment to comprehend that it was far too early on the West Coast to get anyone on the line. “Then get me Carl,” he said. “And what do I have scheduled for this morning?” He was thinking of canceling everything to get right on the issue of iPS RAPID.
“Other than in-house meetings, you are supposed to meet with Michael Calabrese in his downtown office at ten-forty-five. Did you forget?”
“I forgot,” Ben admitted. He thanked himself for having hired someone as good as Jacqueline to keep tabs on his schedule. He considered himself more of a concept guy. Although it was important to deal with the issue of this new company, in the long run it was more important to deal with Michael and break off the Mafia-Yakuza connection. Intuitively, he understood that the longer the association went on, the harder it was going to be to stop it. He also knew that if the connection were ever leaked he’d probably have to resign, or at the very least he’d have to kiss good-bye any chance of launching an IPO anytime soon. What he didn’t let himself even consider was the possibility of an indictment.
With Jacqueline off to find Carl, Ben went back to the article, musing over what class of small molecules was involved. He guessed it was probably some kind of suppression of growth factor inhibitor, but that was only the obvious. As he read he marveled over the speed of biomedical discoveries, especially knowing that such discoveries invariably pointed to other possibilities, which spawned even more discoveries, in a quickening self-fulfilling process. He also knew there were discoveries and there were discoveries, meaning some were huge steps and others not so huge. He considered this present discovery to be one of the relatively big ones, at least in relation to the commercialization of iPS cells.
“You wanted to see me?” a voice called from the doorway to the hall a few minutes later.
Carl was standing there with his tie loosened, the top button unbuttoned on his shirt, and his sleeves rolled up to just above the elbows. He was the picture of the hard-working accountant rather than the CFO, which was why he was so good at what he did. There was nothing beneath him. He was involved in every aspect of the business’s finances from the mundane to the conceptual, and Ben trusted him implicitly and relied on him completely.
“Come in! Sit down and take a look at this!” Ben said, handing Carl the article.
Ben watched his chief financial officer’s expression as he read, noticing a frown develop. Then, in an apparent moment of frustration when he was finished, Carl slapped the journal down onto the surface of Ben’s desk and lifted his face to him. “There’s something I have to come clean about. It’s a confession of sorts.”
“What in the blazes are you talking about?” Ben asked, while in his mind he was concerned about being blindsided by some kind of major financial problem just when things were looking so rosy.