You Lost Me There Read Online Free PDF

a conversation about genetic mechanisms. “What are we talking about?”
    “Say we swim upstream. So, what was your line before you met Sara? For picking up girls. Courting, they would have called it.”
    “You know, I don’t think I had one.”
    Lucy unlatched her watch, some heavy global-positioning machinery, and set it on the coffee table. She’d recently taken up mountaineering.
    “I picture you sweating.”
    “Interesting.”
    “How many, would you estimate?”
    “What?”
    “Women. Dates.” Lucy paused, scanned the room, and pushed her hair back with two hands. “So I would like you to surgically remove my head. Whatever skills you’ve picked up. Actually, know what, forget it, I’ll work this one out on my own.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    Lucy collapsed lightly on my couch.
    Lucy Sejung Park was in her early forties, a Ph.D. and senior scientist, my longest-serving employee. She was also my co-principal investigator, a heavy-lidded workhorse who rarely left campus. Lucy was demanding, reliable, quick-witted, and born caffeinated. Generous and considerate to her coworkers, a gifted researcher, but also caustic and sarcastic, the office gossip, and easily wounded when her defenses were down. Neither scientist-as-wonk nor a madcap genius cliché, Lucy was a second-generation Korean-American from Newark who liked horror movies. She was five-seven, with a marathoner’s figure; a health nut; a body-as-a-temple type. Lucy was permanently agitating toward becoming someone new, one of those people who never completely graduated from adolescence. When she did leave the lab, it was usually to train for whatever new sport she’d picked up that season, pursuing it to an expert’s level before abandoning it for something else. Over the winter she’d started rock climbing and gotten a double-helix tattoo on her left biceps, which she liked to show off when we were interviewing job candidates. As far as I’d seen, she kept few friends. Her love life was shaky. She had all the aptitudes necessary for complex analysis, for competing in triathlons or playing violin, just not for human relationships.
    As coworkers, though, we had an unusually close bond, and one I treasured. Lucy was my vault, my institutional memory. No one else had worked for me so long or knew me better. New hires were always surprised by how we teased each other, which some around Soborg found off-putting, even flirtatious. But Lucy was a daughter to me. Technically she was under my direction, though she had earned a high level of autonomy and ran her own projects. Her name someday would be better known than mine, especially if her most recent experiments played out.
    Our work at that point concentrated on isolating the protein fragments that nurtured brain cells. The hope was that we could prevent the loss of brain function caused by Alzheimer’s with a medication based on those isolated pieces. But we were a long distance from our goal, and we’d run into a problem: the fragment we’d isolated was obese. On a molecular level, the resulting drug would be too large to pass through the fine mesh of a human’s blood-brain barrier.
    Basically, our pill could work, but it was too big at the moment for the brain to swallow.
    Lucy, on the other hand, had struck a eureka moment the previous autumn in her own research. The current thinking in the Alzheimer’s community held the disease to be caused by a knotty protein called Abeta. Because Abeta was sufficiently complicated, we assumed there to be multiple and complex Abeta mechanisms involved in causing Alzheimer’s. But Lucy had isolated a single mechanism, a sole receptor in mice that prevented them from developing the disease. Treating Alzheimer’s therefore could become relatively simple: Design a drug that would block the identified mechanism, and all would be well. Since then, Lucy and her technicians were pulling all hours, figuring out exactly how such a drug would work. For that