Nothing was supposed to change.
That's what they told her. Three months ago when Alison first heard that Sementex, the small biotech company she worked for was being bought out by the massive multinational company FMG pharmaceuticals. Research programs that were approved were to continue, FMG was buying them out for their products and intellectual property after all, why would they cancel things? Or so the story went. Alison almost believed it.
But now, sitting in her new boss's waiting room, waiting to be summoned on the carpet, all sorts of dire predictions were running through her mind.
"Dr. Sullivan will see you now, Dr. Galloway," said the receptionist, Sandra Adams. She was the type of woman who normally make Alison uncomfortable with herself, tall, blonde, and stunning, with a brilliant smile and a full, bombshell figure. 'They're probably fake' Alison thought to herself cattily.
Alison, in contrast to Sandra, was a mousy female academic. She was very tall, nearly 6 feet, but you'd never know it, as she hunched over a lot to conceal her height. Her body was almost unnaturally thin - she weighed only 112 pounds, with a boyish, bony figure, and no breasts to speak of. Her face was striking with sharp, high cheekbones and enormous green eyes, and she could have been beautiful, a tall, willowy model type, if she had worked at it, but Alison Galloway worked at the opposite. Always afraid to show her femininity in the overwhelmingly male dominated world of scientific research, like many female scientists, Alison wore sloppy clothes and never any jewelry or makeup. She wore large ugly glasses many years out of fashion, and had a bad habit of biting her nails until they hurt. Her hair was thick and blonde, long, but uncared for and pulled back into a ponytail of frizz and split ends pretty much all the time. When it wasn't, her hair looked like she cut it herself, with a uniform length everywhere, except at the bangs which were cut short to keep out of her eyes.
She often thought about that - the way she dressed and presented herself. Dr. Alison Galloway was a incredibly intelligent woman, she knew she could be beautiful if she tried. But somehow the security of being the plain, mousy woman held her tight. She told herself that her colleagues would only take her seriously if she was as far from a sex object as possible. She told herself that she refused to pander to societal ideals of how a woman should look. She told herself that it was just too much trouble, and too shallow to spend time working at being beautiful. But for all her confidence in herself professionally and scientifically, the sight of a magnificent stunner like Miss Adams provoked feelings of inadequacy, self consciousness and jealous anger in Alison.
But not today. Today Alison hardly noticed her. Today, her thoughts were buried in her work. Alison had spent the last 6 years of her life, since graduate school, working on a compound to promote protein synthesis, and it was finally close to becoming a reality. I would be a godsend to millions of people with muscular atrophying diseases and chronic wasting, helping their body synthesize more protein to the muscular structure. She was hoping to apply for FDA approval for initial clinical trials on human subjects to determine toxicity, but the ABG buyout had put that project on hold. Clinical trials were very expensive. Alison wasn't going to stand for that. She hunched into Michael Sullivan's office ready to fight for her life's work.
Alison had never been a fighter, she had always ran from any confrontation, but today, over this, she was ready to fight hard.
Dr. Mike Sullivan was in the business of science. He wasn't an old man, only 38, but it had been years since he'd been in a lab as anything other than a tourist. Even back when he was an active researcher he spent far more of his time on connections and networking than solvents and assays. His students used to joke that when Mike showed up at the lab they had to assign him an escort to make sure he didn't touch anything and mess it up. It wasn't much of an exaggeration. Nevertheless, he was a very smart man, and ambitious.
Now, at 38 Mike had his sights on VP research for FMG pharmaceuticals, a job that would make him rich beyond belief. But to get to that lofty position, he needed to make the Sementex acquisition work. Sementex had a lot of promising projects, but a lot of them were risky with a slim chance of paying off, and even if they did, a very long time horizon to profitability. It was Mike's plan to pick the ones that could show a profit quickly and throw his support and resources behind them, and abandon the rest of the dogs to wither without any funding. That way his baby Sementex would show up as a hugely lucrative acquisition in the short term and, with luck (and Mike's voice in their ears at every opportunity) his superiors would notice and promote him quickly before the pipeline dried up.
Speaking of dogs, Dr. Galloway was here. God, what a mess she was, especially standing next to the exquisite Sandy Adams. She should really at least get her hair done. What is it about some women in science that they just didn't try? Mike watched Sandra's fantastic breasts bounce slightly as she walked in. He thought he was being discrete, but both women knew exactly what he was looking at. Sandy gave him a short, dazzling smile, and Alison fumed inside.
"Dr. Galloway, take a seat please. I've been looking over the specifics of your proposal to take your project to clinical testing, and I wanted to ask you a few questions before I make my decision," Mike opened, never hinting that his mind was already made up.
"You're working on a project to promote protein synthesis in muscle tissue in humans. This has the potential to be a blockbuster, the sports supplement possibilities are staggering..."
"I'm more concerned with the potential impact as a treatment against muscle wasting diseases, Dr. Sullivan," Alison interrupted.
"Yes, of course. As I was saying I'm concerned about some of the particulars of the project. Early animal testing seems to suggest that the product can only work on females, is that correct?"
"Yes, Dr. Sullivan. Many pathways are involved in muscle hypertrophy in mammals. The primary one is based on the male hormone testosterone, but for a number of reasons, that has proved difficult to manipulate. We've had tremendous success, however, in manipulating another, secondary muscle growth pathway, based on female hormones, primarily estrogen but these pathways are essentially inactive in males. The treatment works on stimulating the body's own muscle growth machinery, essentially tricking it into thinking you've just had a hard workout. It's much more effective than working out though. The problem with weight training to promote muscular hypertrophy is that you have to take 2 steps back to take 3 forward. The training breaks down muscle fibers which the body then regrows bigger and stronger. My treatment skips the first part, but mimics the chemical signals that cause the body to grow muscle. In addition, the synthetic signals are many times stronger than those that come as a response to resistance training, and the results in animal studies are truly incredible."
"I see. You've had some problems with fatalities in the rats, haven't you?"
"Yes, but we understand why that is now. Simply put, the body can only handle so much mass, whether it's muscle or fat or whatever. The rats that died were advanced subjects, their muscle mass had been increased to the point where they weighed many times what is normal, and their organs simply couldn't handle the increased mass. However, when we set an end point earlier in the mass development we have no problems with fatalities, and in fact the rats emerge from the experiments in fantastic health by all traditional measures."
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