The Meeting (October 2012) November 8, 2013 by jamessummerton It had been several months since my father approached me about helping him with getting Dr. Moss’ Alzheimer’s treatment available to the public, and had partially forgotten about it. I was into my very last term of school, and while the lab section I was taking was a lot less enjoyable than summer’s microbiology, you can only complain so much about a two credit term before you can’t take yourself seriously anymore. This term I was in a vertebrate physiology lab, which as best as I can remember now, mostly involved identifying various vertebrates by their image or skeleton. We learned a little bit about how vertebrates work and saw a tiny bit of evolutionary data on them, which was my favorite part of the class. But mostly it was all ‘do you recognize this species? What is it? What’s it’s fancy latin name?’
I suck at that sort of thing. Also I don’t like it which makes me suck worse.
I think it was late September when my father started talking to me more frequently about the project. I was aware he’d been working on it in the background, but it wasn’t anything I could really help him with. He was figuring out how he wanted to proceed with clinical trials, how he wanted to change the excipient. An excipient is the stuff you put the drug in so it goes to the right place in the body (well, that’s what ours did anyways). Dr. Moss had used peanut oil, which both goes rancid and allows the drug to leak out of the capsule in a matter of weeks, giving the drug a basically unworkable shelf life in the commercial world. He developed a few he wanted to try and even hired on a new chemist to help him test them and set up our GMP facility (FDA approved facility for manufacturing something that will go into a human). I vaguely recognized her as being a friend of my sister’s, and had some brief interaction with her when we were training her as a backup production assistant in case our production staff ever got incapacitated.
It’s actually really rough sometimes working in a crew of three people, because if one gets pregnant that means no one else is really allowed to get sick until she delivers. This has come up 3 times so far in my 14ish years.
That’s a lot of tangents. I mean the title of this entry was a meeting in October and I haven’t even mentioned it yet! I’ll get to that shortly, just need to list of my favorite five foods and comments on my feelings regarding the state of the economy and… Oh, right. Attention span.
So, early October Dr. Moss flies in with his wife from El Paso. He comes to our facility with a power point presentation explaining the last 30 years of his work on the project as well as an explanation of how the drug works. Thanks to my brand new bio degree (almost) I actually understood the mechanism pretty well when he explained it. The short description is that it decreases the degradation of an important neurotransmitter in the brain. If you decrease something’s degradation, then as a general rule, you will increase its amount and this was no exception to that rule. This is actually a well proven technique to combat dementia and memory loss, and is used by today’s drugs. The difference between MSF and current iterations of this sort of technique is that MSF can be used in such a manner that it only increases the neurotransmitter in the brain, and not the rest of the body. This is important because this same neurotransmitter is used extensively throughout the body to control smooth muscle tissue. Too much of it in places other than the brain and you have extensive problems with diarhea and nausea, and can even in very high dosages impact the heart. Without these side effects to limit MSF’s dosage, it can be administered in much higher net concentrations, giving it three to four times the effectiveness.
If that doesn’t make much sense just now, don’t worry. We ran into and tried to solve the problems of communicating clearly why MSF works so well to the general lay-public. But that was all much later. For now, this was the way it was presented to me at the time (albeit with lots of useful visuals and more extensively).
The presentation was given to every employee of Gene Tools, my dad’s old college mentor, our groundskeeper, and my parent’s dentists. I found out later that they had been under the impression that this was a business venture seeking investment. An understandable misunderstanding as what we actually were seems a little nonsensical. My father wanted to set up this new project as an Limited Liability Company that solicits charitable loans from the public on the grounds that we’re working for the common good and without much hope of turning a large profit due to the lack of patent protection on the drug.
In short, we were a 30 million dollar Kickstarter project.
I do not blame them for being a little baffled by our business plan.
Now before this project my father had acquired a lot of money over the decade and a half he’d been running his research reagent business. He had also become very paranoid about the growing likelihood of our country entering a recession, so after moving half of his money to Canada because, well, it’s Canada. Nothing bad ever happens in Canada… Anyways, after moving half his money there he used much of the rest to invest in things that don’t lose as much value during a recession. He bought himself a ranch out about halfway between where he lived and the Oregon coast. The ranch was just outside a minuscule little town that consisted of a few homes, a single general store, a gas station that looked closed, a bar that was closed and condemned, and a restaurant that had closed due to the recession. Deciding that since he had this ranch, but nowhere to eat at, he bought the restaurant and gave it back on loan to the woman that had owned it previously with the intent that she would run it until she had enough money to pay him back at which point she would buy it from him.
Now he had a place to eat and study when he went to his ranch.
And that is where the next part of our meeting took place. This part was more of a social event/brainstorming session where we got treated to some truly wonderful food and talked about how we could possibly solicit 30 million from the public during a tail end of a recession. Once dinner was done most of the extras went home, leaving employees to retreat to my father’s ranch to continue. I’m not really sure what happened after that as I had gotten sick and went home shortly after arriving, but I understand they had pie.
The next day the meeting resumed at the restaurant… Yes, this was probably a ten hour meeting altogether. I travelled back out to the tiny little town with mist and rain obscuring what little sunlight peaked over the mountains at 7 in the morning and managed to arrive just before we were supposed to start at 8:00. No one was there. I went to the ranch to see if they were meeting there first and no one was there. Then I called my parents who did not answer, and then I went back to the restaurant to see if it was just that everyone else was late. No one was there. Finally I drove home, keeping an eye out for any familiar cars that passed me.
I was pretty confused, but much later that morning (around 10:30) i got a call from one of the more gungho employees who had come to the fourth meeting in two days on the subject asking where I was. Apparently the meeting time had been moved, and as I’d gone home sick I was the only one that wasn't informed. Forty five minutes later I show up to the very tail end of Part IV of the meeting. But that’s okay, because I was in time for… yeah, Part V. The employees all went home after we took some pictures.
After pictures were taken, Dan and Chan went home and the rest of us (Dr. Moss, Joan Moss, mom, dad and I) went back to the ranch to do further brainstorming of how this entire endeavor would play out. It was at this point Dad decided to confirm with me what I had agreed to do for the group. I was going to handle the business end of things, put up the website and maintain it, and periodically go with him to solicit funds.
In his mind I’d agreed to this previously, and to his credit he had actually asked me about most of this before. My reply was: I might be willing to help someone that knows what they’re doing with the website content, but I don’t know anything about business so I’m not going to do that.
His memory sometimes edits people’s responses to things. Sometimes a lot.
I was on the spot though, and I’d already shown up late to Part IV of the meeting and felt embarrassed about that so I agreed. I figured I could bring in people that knew what they were doing later with regards to the website, and mom actually has been an accountant since I was 13 so I could ask her for help with the business stuff. With that concluded he stayed to talk some with Don before Don headed out to see the marvelous sights of the Oregon coast… Marvelous mostly because it had stopped raining earlier that morning.
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