Chapter 8
I watched my patient gasp for breath. He seemed like he would be all right.
“Take a deep breath.”
I felt the patient's wrist and checked his blood pressure. His pulse quickly returned. That meant his systolic pressure had risen above about 80.
Acute anaphylaxis.
Simply put, a severe allergic reaction.
If the airway's mucous membranes swell and block the flow of air, it can be fatal. Anaphylaxis can also cause shock.
Sitting on the floor amid the crowd was a thin white man. For some reason, he had the sort of face that made him look prone to allergies.
“He'll be okay, right?”
I fiddled with the EpiPen prototype in my hand.
Everyone's eyes were on me.
It used epinephrine, an existing allergy medication, so there was no reason it shouldn't work. Still, I was relieved to see that it had.
Once the patient who'd collapsed got back to his feet, the band in the middle of the banquet hall quietly resumed playing. What was this, a sitcom?
At least the immediate crisis was over.
I helped the patient to his feet, and his family came over to support him.
He coughed a few times as if in pain, but seemed to recover quickly.
He turned to look at me.
“You saved my life… Are you a doctor?”
“Yes. It was simply what I had to do.”
The man seemed to recognize me only then.
“Oh, you're the one who gave the speech before the gala began… What was that condition?”
His symptoms had disappeared as soon as I administered epinephrine. It was definitely acute anaphylaxis.
“A fairly severe allergic reaction.”
“But I don't have any allergies.”
“You do now.”
I shook my head. Allergies usually develop after repeated exposure, though quite a few cases seem to come on out of nowhere.
My patient bowed his head to me.
“Yes… If you hadn't been there, I might have died today. Thank you so much.”
The patient's family, who had gathered around him in the blink of an eye, thanked me.
It was ridiculous to hear him call me a student, but I suppose that's how I looked to Americans.
“You should still go to the hospital. And find out what food you were allergic to.”
The man offered me his hand.
“I'm Arthur Valentine. If you ever need anything, please contact me… I'll help you as much as I possibly can.”
He handed me his business card, and I crumpled it into my pocket.
I was glad everything had ended well.
The EpiPen.
The first demonstration of a civilian epinephrine injector had gone successfully. I'd expected it to work, but I hadn't thought it would go exactly as planned this quickly.
Lieselotte watched me and the EpiPen injector in my hand with interest.
“Would you like to see it?”
I set the EpiPen on the table, and she picked it up and examined it slowly.
“That's fascinating… It's amazing there's a treatment for it, too. How did you know someone would collapse from an allergy today?”
“I explained it earlier. Certain allergies are more severe among white people and Jews, and people with those traits are common here tonight.”
Lieselotte tilted her head.
“I thought you were joking.”
“I wasn't.”
She stared blankly into space, lost in thought. I looked at her again.
She had the air of a young woman from a prestigious family.
Her name was Lieselotte Weisman, right?
The Weismans were a huge banking family based in Palo Alto. Their capital extended across American industry, with Stanford at the center.
Two women in black suits near Lieselotte were watching me.
Armed bodyguards, probably.
She smiled again.
“How interesting… Now you're going to ask us to invest in your invention, aren't you?”
She looked young, but I guess the banking family gave its children an early education in business.
Or maybe she'd simply met plenty of people who approached her looking for investments or money.
“No.”
I had no particular intention of doing that.
The EpiPen was something I planned to patent and then take to a pharmaceutical company that already had the capacity to produce epinephrine. Making medicine wasn't something you could do with money or technology alone.
“Why not?”
“It's not something venture capitalists can help with. I'll take it to a pharmaceutical company.”
Lieselotte awkwardly scratched her head.
“I see…”
“Money isn't the only thing that matters, is it? Not when it's something that saves lives. This isn't something to approach as an investment.”
***
Lieselotte was quietly surprised.
The Weisman family had fled Germany during World War II. Their lineage went back to before the age of Prussia.
When the old world died, they brought the wealth clinging to its corpse to the new empire. America had welcomed them with open arms.
Alongside Stanford, the Weisman family invested in cutting-edge technology through academia.
Lockheed, which made airplanes; Xerox, which made printers; Fairchild, which made semiconductors.
She'd seen plenty of strange people.
Where there was money, flies were bound to gather. People even came to Lieselotte, the family's youngest daughter, from time to time.
Most were people asking for money for one reason or another. They had a new business or a new idea, and all they needed was money.
They usually called themselves ‘venture capitalists’ or ‘venture entrepreneurs.’
Lieselotte's father went out of his way to avoid people like that, on the grounds that you shouldn't feed pigeons or raccoons by the trash cans.
If you gave those hustlers money or put them in touch with someone, the problem wouldn't be losing the money; it would be attracting a swarm of pests…
Anyway. She'd assumed this man would be no different, showing off his new invention and trying to sell it.
Was anything more important than money?
He wasn't going to sell it?
Sacrilege. In Silicon Valley, a place full of venture capitalists and would-be entrepreneurs, it was impossible to imagine.
Let's ask him about it properly.
“How does the medication work?”
The black-haired doctor continued.
“It's nothing special. It's a medication for acute allergic reactions that's used pretty often in hospitals. I want to popularize a pen-shaped device so people can use it outside the hospital in an emergency.”
He seemed happy.
It wasn't easy to follow what he was saying about medicine, but she'd understood the point. Lieselotte decided to trust the doctor's sincerity.
She set a business card down on the table.
He frowned slightly, as if wondering why she was giving it to him when he hadn't asked for one.
“Do you have money? You look too young for that.”
“I do have money! Well, this isn't my own business card. It's my father's.”
***
I looked at the business card on the table.
It couldn't have been easy to get a card like this. Lieselotte's father. It was like having the personal contact information of a chaebol chairman in Korea.
“Thank you.”
This hadn't been part of my plan, but it looked like I might be able to make the EpiPen a reality sooner than expected.
The drug itself already existed, so if I could really get help from the Weisman family, we could start selling it in no time.
Money really is nice, isn't it?
I'd just confidently said money wasn't the most important thing, though.
In the end.
What it took to make the medicine and get it into people's hands quickly was overwhelming financial power. Not that finding investors would have been difficult.
And so.
Not much time passed.
Before I had a chance to contact the number on the business card, a man in a suit appeared in front of me. It wasn't hard to guess who he was.
A middle-aged man who looked a lot like Lieselotte.
The owner of this banquet hall.
He looked like a Viking.
His eyes were fierce, as if he'd just finished burning down a monastery on the English coast.
“I heard there was a bit of a commotion. They tell me you saved one of my guests. I'll make sure a young doctor like you isn't left unrewarded.”
I bowed my head in greeting.
“Thank you.”
“This is why we give scholarships and invest in schools. There's no way to know who might collapse without warning, just like the person you saved a moment ago…”
The head of the Weisman family smiled bitterly.
“Well, that's true.”
“I heard you just used a new medicine. Could you show me what it is?”
I showed him the EpiPen.
There wasn't much you could tell from the injector alone. The man studied it as if trying to reach a judgment, then looked back at me.
“Come to think of it, there's a rumor that one of Weisman’s Stanford scholarship students has had two papers published in Nature. Is that…?”
“That would be me, too.”
He looked as if he couldn't believe it, but it was true this time, too! I nodded.
The man handed the EpiPen back to me.
“I can't make much of it just by hearing about it. I'll set up a meeting with a pharmaceutical company backed by Weisman, and you can explain the new medicine you've developed to them.”
I blinked.
This was the moment I'd been waiting for. I needed to build a good relationship with a pharmaceutical company if I wanted to make medicine or develop new treatments in the future.
***
Meanwhile.
Stanford Pediatric Ward.
The four Stanford doctors had fifty years of clinical experience between them. They paced anxiously as they stared at the thermometer. What on earth…
A mysterious fever.
A three-year-old child was half dead. One of the fellows sighed and spoke up.
“It's been three days with a temperature of 40°C. We can't get the fever down at all. If we give any more antipyretics, the child's liver's going to be wrecked, never mind the fever. What do we do?”
The chief of pediatrics sighed.
“I don't know.”
They'd already tried everything they could.