- 5 weeks ago
Drug discovery is not what the textbooks told you it is. From the bench to the boardroom, every level of the pharmaceutical industry runs on a mix of science, politics, money, and quiet compromise. This is what it actually looks like from the inside.
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VIDEO TOPICS/TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 The Lab Technician
3:13 The Associate Scientist
6:32 The Scientist
9:19 The Senior Scientist
11:27 The Director
14:00 The Vice President
19:24 The Senior Vice President
25:22 The Chief Scientific Officer
27:33 The CEO
28:15 The Founder's Ghost
☕ Support the channel & suggest my next video idea: https://ko-fi.com/masterpov
VIDEO TOPICS/TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 The Lab Technician
3:13 The Associate Scientist
6:32 The Scientist
9:19 The Senior Scientist
11:27 The Director
14:00 The Vice President
19:24 The Senior Vice President
25:22 The Chief Scientific Officer
27:33 The CEO
28:15 The Founder's Ghost
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Level 1. The Lab Technician
00:02You show up at 7.30 in the morning.
00:04The parking lot is already half full.
00:07The building is five stories of mirrored glass in a business park outside Boston.
00:12You swipe your badge at the front door.
00:14You swipe it again at the elevator.
00:16You swipe it a third time at the lab entrance.
00:19Every swipe is logged.
00:21Every movement is tracked.
00:24You are 24 years old with a bachelor's degree in biochemistry
00:27and $60,000 in student loans.
00:30Your starting salary is $52,000 a year.
00:34After taxes and rent and loan payments,
00:37you have enough left over for groceries and almost nothing else.
00:40You put on a white coat, safety glasses, and two pairs of nitrile gloves.
00:45You walk to your bench.
00:47There is a rack of 96 well plates waiting for you.
00:51There is always a rack of 96 well plates waiting for you.
00:55Your job is to run assays.
00:57Hundreds of them.
00:59Thousands of them over the course of a year.
01:01You pipette tiny volumes of liquid from one tube to another
01:05following protocols written by scientists who never have to execute them.
01:09The protocols are thick binders full of acronyms and molarities and incubation times.
01:14You follow them exactly.
01:16If you deviate, the data is worthless.
01:19If the data is worthless,
01:21someone upstairs has to explain why the project is behind schedule.
01:24That explanation will eventually land on you.
01:29You work in a group of six technicians managed by a senior scientist who has a Ph.D. and a
01:34corner cubicle.
01:35He barely knows your name.
01:37He calls you by the name of the technician who worked at your bench before you.
01:41You stop correcting him after the second month.
01:44Your days are repetitive in a way that nothing in school prepared you for.
01:48You prepare buffers.
01:50You run gels.
01:51You feed cell cultures.
01:53You clean instruments that cost more than your annual salary.
01:57You generate data that goes into spreadsheets that go into presentations
02:00that go into meetings you are not invited to.
02:04Once a week, your supervisor hands you a new compound to test.
02:08You don't know where it came from.
02:09You don't know what it's supposed to do.
02:11You just know it has a code name and a structure and a protocol attached to it.
02:16You run the assay.
02:17You enter the results.
02:19You move on.
02:20Six months in, you realize something.
02:22The compound you are testing today might be the exact same compound you tested in March
02:28with a different code name.
02:30They don't tell you.
02:31They don't have to.
02:33You are a pair of hands.
02:35Your hands don't need context.
02:38You eat lunch in a cafeteria in the basement.
02:40The food is subsidized.
02:42The conversations are careful.
02:44Nobody talks about the work openly.
02:47Confidentiality agreements cover everything you do.
02:49You cannot tell your parents what molecule you are working on.
02:53You cannot tell your college friends what your project involves.
02:57You cannot post anything on social media that even hints at your day.
03:02You start to feel like you have two lives.
03:04The one inside the badge swipe doors and the one outside them.
03:08The outside life gets quieter.
03:10You stop trying to explain.
03:13Level 2.
03:14The Associate Scientist.
03:16You got promoted after three years.
03:18The promotion came with a 12% raise and a new job title that means almost nothing outside the company.
03:25You now have an Associate's Degree of Responsibility and a Bachelor's Degree of Salary.
03:31You still run experiments.
03:33You still pipette.
03:34But you also design some of the work now.
03:37You plan out experiments.
03:39You troubleshoot when things go wrong.
03:41You mentor the new technicians who show up every fall looking terrified and underpaid, the way you showed up three
03:48years ago.
03:49You sit in on project team meetings.
03:52You are the junior person at the table.
03:55You don't speak unless spoken to.
03:57You take notes.
03:59You watch the senior scientists argue about assay conditions and statistical power,
04:04and whether the latest results are real or artifact.
04:08You learn that science inside a pharmaceutical company is not about discovering truth.
04:13It is about managing risk.
04:15Every experiment has a political dimension.
04:18Positive results keep the program alive.
04:21Negative results kill it.
04:23Killing a program means someone's promotion is delayed.
04:27Someone's bonus is smaller.
04:29Someone's team gets dissolved.
04:31So the pressure is always to find something.
04:35To frame the data in a way that justifies continuing.
04:38You are learning to read these pressures.
04:41Your project is a small molecule inhibitor for a cancer target that three other companies are also chasing.
04:48The science is crowded.
04:49The timelines are tight.
04:52Your team leader mentions the competition in every meeting.
04:55She shows slides with logos of rival companies and pipeline comparisons.
04:59You are racing people you will never meet to get to a finish line that keeps moving.
05:06The compound that looked promising in January has toxicity issues by June.
05:10The compound that solved the toxicity issues in July has solubility issues by September.
05:17Every problem solved creates two new problems.
05:21This is how drug discovery actually works.
05:24The textbooks lied to you.
05:26You start thinking about graduate school.
05:28Some of your friends from college are finishing PhDs at Stanford and MIT.
05:34They post photos of themselves in lab coats holding bottles of champagne.
05:38You wonder if you should have gone that route.
05:41You wonder if the ceiling you are starting to feel is something you can break through here.
05:45Or if you need the letters after your name.
05:48You take the GRE on a Saturday morning.
05:51You score well enough.
05:53You apply to six programs.
05:55You get into four.
05:57You pick one.
05:58You give your two weeks notice.
06:00Your supervisor wishes you luck.
06:02She says the door is open if you ever want to come back.
06:05You smile.
06:07You know you will come back.
06:09Almost everyone does.
06:10The academic path looks different from the inside than from the outside.
06:16The industry pays better.
06:18The industry has better equipment.
06:20The industry actually makes things that reach patients.
06:24You tell yourself you will remember that when you are halfway through your PhD and eating
06:29ramen for the third night in a row.
06:31Level 3.
06:33The scientist.
06:34You went back for your PhD.
06:36Five years at a state university doing research that felt like it mattered in the moment and
06:41feels smaller every year in retrospect.
06:44You published three papers.
06:46You defended your thesis in front of a committee of five people who had all read it poorly.
06:52Now you are back in industry.
06:54Different company.
06:55Bigger molecule.
06:56Higher salary.
06:58You are officially a scientist now.
07:01There is a plaque outside your office with your name and your degree.
07:05You lead a small project.
07:07Three technicians and two associate scientists report to you.
07:09You are 32 years old and responsible for spending around $2 million a year on reagents and contractor
07:16services.
07:17Nobody taught you how to manage a budget.
07:19You figure it out by asking embarrassing questions of the finance liaison and pretending you already
07:25knew the answers.
07:26You write protocols.
07:28You design experiments.
07:29You interpret results.
07:31You present to the project team every two weeks.
07:34The project team has a program lead who reports to a department head who reports to a
07:39vice president.
07:40Information flows up.
07:41Decisions flow down.
07:43Your job is to execute the decisions and package the information in a way that keeps the program
07:49alive.
07:50You learn the language of the industry.
07:52Go-no-go criteria.
07:54Target product profile.
07:56Pharmacokinetics.
07:57Pharmacodynamics.
07:59IND enabling studies.
08:01The regulatory terminology that turns biology into a series of checkpoints that the FDA will
08:06eventually review.
08:07You start to understand that the drug is not the molecule.
08:10The drug is the dossier.
08:13Thousands of pages of data and analysis submitted to regulators who will decide whether patients
08:18are allowed to access it.
08:20The molecule is almost incidental.
08:22The paperwork is the product.
08:24Your compound enters IND enabling toxicology studies.
08:28You fly to a contract research organization in Pennsylvania to watch the studies get set up.
08:33You see the animal facility.
08:35You see the rats in their cages and the beagles in theirs.
08:38You don't let yourself think about what is going to happen to them.
08:41The ethics review board approved the study.
08:44The regulations require animal testing before any molecule can go into humans.
08:48You tell yourself it is necessary.
08:51Some nights, you believe it.
08:53You come home from that trip and your partner asks how it went.
08:56You say it went fine.
08:58You don't describe the kennels.
09:00You don't describe the way one of the beagles wagged its tail at you through the bars.
09:04You pour a glass of wine and watch a cooking show.
09:07You tell yourself this is just how medicine gets made.
09:10Every drug in the cabinet above the bathroom sink went through something similar.
09:14That is true.
09:16It does not make it easier to fall asleep.
09:18Level 4.
09:20The Senior Scientist
09:21You have been promoted twice more.
09:24You now manage a group of 12 people across two floors.
09:27You have budget authority up to a million dollars per quarter without needing approval.
09:32You sit at the project team table as a full voting member.
09:36Your opinion shapes the direction of programs that could one day become medicines that people take.
09:41Your compound made it through TOX.
09:44It made it through Phase 1 clinical trials and healthy volunteers.
09:48You got to see the first clinical data on a Monday morning.
09:52The conference room was full of people who had been working toward that moment for six years.
09:56The drug was safe.
09:58The drug had the expected exposure.
10:00The drug did something measurable in the body that suggested it was engaging the target.
10:06Everyone clapped.
10:07Someone brought champagne into the conference room even though it was 10 in the morning.
10:12You drank half a plastic cup.
10:14Now the compound is in Phase 2.
10:16This is where most drugs die.
10:19The company is betting hundreds of millions of dollars that the molecule you helped design will actually help sick people.
10:25The trials are running at 40 hospitals across 12 countries.
10:29Every week you see enrollment updates and safety reports.
10:33Every month you see efficacy readouts.
10:35Some of the readouts are encouraging.
10:38Some of them are confusing.
10:40Some of them you try to frame as encouraging, even when they are not.
10:44The alternative is that the program gets killed.
10:47200 people lose the projects they have been working on for years.
10:51You travel now.
10:53A lot.
10:54You fly to investigator meetings where you train physicians on how to administer the drug and how to record side
11:00effects.
11:00You fly to scientific conferences where you present data and listen to competitors present theirs.
11:06You fly to headquarters in New Jersey for quarterly review meetings.
11:10You sleep in hotels more nights than you sleep in your own bed.
11:14Your marriage strains.
11:15Your kids are in elementary school and you miss their parent-teacher conferences.
11:20Your spouse is understanding but quieter every year.
11:24You tell yourself the sacrifices are temporary.
11:27They are not.
11:29Level 5.
11:30The Director.
11:31You manage managers now.
11:3340 people report up to you through three senior scientists.
11:37You are no longer in the lab.
11:39You haven't pipetted anything in four years.
11:42Your hands have softened.
11:44Your expertise has shifted.
11:47You are no longer a bench scientist.
11:49You are a pharmaceutical executive in training.
11:52Your job is portfolio management.
11:55You oversee not one program but four.
11:58Some are in discovery.
12:00Some are in preclinical development.
12:02Some are in clinical trials.
12:04You sit in on every project team.
12:06You read every weekly report.
12:09You make decisions about where to invest and where to cut.
12:13You kill projects.
12:15That is the hardest part.
12:17You sit in a conference room with a team that has worked on a molecule for three years.
12:22You tell them the program is being terminated.
12:24They knew it was coming.
12:26They saw the data.
12:27But hearing it out loud still lands like a punch.
12:31Some of them get reassigned.
12:33Some of them get laid off.
12:35You write personalized emails to the ones you care about.
12:38You don't write anything to the ones you don't know well enough.
12:42You learn about the business side of the industry.
12:44You attend meetings about pricing strategy.
12:47You attend meetings about market access.
12:50You attend meetings with the patent attorneys about intellectual property and exclusivity windows.
12:55You learn that a drug's commercial value is determined by the overlap between its patent life and its approval date.
13:02If the patents expire before the drug is approved, there is no business case.
13:07If the patents have 15 years left at approval, the drug is potentially worth billions.
13:13The science is real.
13:15The science also has to be profitable.
13:18One without the other does not survive inside a public company.
13:23You attend your first board-level briefing.
13:26You walk into a room full of people whose names appear in the annual report.
13:30You present data for 10 minutes.
13:32You answer questions for 20.
13:35The board members ask sharp questions.
13:38One of them asks a question you do not know the answer to.
13:41You admit it.
13:43You say you will get back to them within 48 hours.
13:46They nod.
13:47You leave the room with sweat on your back.
13:50You get back to them in 36 hours.
13:53The answer is good.
13:55Your name starts appearing in conversations you are not part of.
13:59Level 6.
14:01The Vice President
14:02The promotion came with stock options and a new office on the executive floor.
14:07You have an assistant.
14:08You have a reserved parking spot.
14:10You have a title that makes you recognizable at industry events.
14:14People you have never met introduce themselves and ask if you would be willing to grab coffee.
14:19You say yes to most of them.
14:21Some of them will be useful later.
14:23You cannot tell which ones in advance.
14:26You manage a function now.
14:28All of discovery research.
14:30600 people across three sites report up through you.
14:34Your annual budget is over $200 million.
14:38You set the strategy for what the company will work on for the next five years.
14:43You decide which therapeutic areas to invest in.
14:46Oncology is crowded but lucrative.
14:49Rare disease has small patient populations but premium pricing.
14:53Neuroscience has high failure rates but huge potential.
14:57Cardiovascular is cheap but commoditized.
15:00You read industry reports.
15:03You meet with consultants.
15:05You talk to venture capitalists who want to know what you are investing in so they can invest in adjacent
15:10companies.
15:11You guard your information carefully.
15:13One leak can cost millions in stock price.
15:17You manage up as much as you manage down.
15:20The CEO wants to know what you are building.
15:23The CFO wants to know what it will cost.
15:26The chief medical officer wants to know if it will work.
15:29The chief commercial officer wants to know if it will sell.
15:34You assemble presentations that tell different stories to different audiences without contradicting each other.
15:39This is a skill.
15:41It is also a kind of lying.
15:44You have made peace with it because everyone in every executive role at every company does it.
15:49The only alternative is to tell the truth in a way that gets you fired.
15:54Nobody rewards that.
15:56You attend your first earnings call.
15:59You listen from a side room while the CEO and CFO speak to analysts.
16:04The analysts ask about your programs by name.
16:07Whether they are on track.
16:09Whether the enrollment is going well.
16:11Whether the competitive positioning has changed.
16:14The answers the executives give are the ones you wrote in the briefing documents the night before.
16:19The stock moves up 3% after the call.
16:22Your options are worth an extra quarter million dollars.
16:26You refresh the page three times before you close your laptop.
16:31You go home that night and sit at your kitchen island.
16:34Your spouse asks if it went well.
16:36You say yes.
16:37You do not mention the quarter million.
16:41You have not mentioned money in specific numbers in years.
16:45It felt relevant when you were making $52,000.
16:47It feels obscene now.
16:50Your kids are teenagers.
16:52They do not know what you do.
16:54They know you work at a company that makes medicines.
16:57That is enough.
16:59You prefer it that way.
17:01Level 7.
17:02The Senior Vice President.
17:04There are maybe 30 people at this level across the company.
17:08You run an entire division.
17:10Research and Development.
17:11Or Medical Affairs.
17:13Or Business Development.
17:14Whatever the exact title.
17:16You are one of the dozen or so people who actually shape the trajectory of the business.
17:21You report directly to a member of the Executive Committee.
17:24You attend quarterly strategy offsites with the CEO.
17:28You are flown first class to every destination.
17:31You have become a different kind of scientist.
17:34You are now mostly a negotiator.
17:37You negotiate with the FDA about trial designs and approval timelines.
17:42You negotiate with European regulators about different trial designs and different approval timelines.
17:47You negotiate with potential partners about licensing deals and milestone payments and royalty structures.
17:53You negotiate with the company's own business units about resource allocation.
17:58Every conversation is a negotiation.
18:01The people who are good at this level understand something important.
18:04The actual words being said are only the surface of what is happening.
18:09The real content is underneath.
18:11You start thinking about acquisitions.
18:13The company has a strong cash position.
18:16There are small biotechs with interesting molecules and desperate investors.
18:20You evaluate them.
18:22You visit their offices.
18:23You meet their founders.
18:25Some of them are brilliant scientists who built something remarkable.
18:29Some of them are promoters who built a story around questionable data.
18:32You have to tell the difference.
18:34You recommend one of the acquisitions.
18:37The deal closes for $3 billion.
18:39A year later, the molecule fails a phase 3 trial and the acquisition is written off.
18:45Your name is on the deal.
18:46The board is displeased.
18:48You survive.
18:49Barely.
18:50You spend more time with lawyers now than with scientists.
18:53Patent attorneys.
18:54Regulatory attorneys.
18:56Litigation attorneys defending the company against class action lawsuits brought by patients
19:01who claim side effects were hidden from them.
19:03You sit in depositions.
19:05You give testimony under oath.
19:07You answer questions about documents you signed years ago about decisions you barely remember
19:12making.
19:13The plaintiff's lawyers try to trap you.
19:15The company's lawyers prep you for days before each appearance.
19:18You survive these too.
19:20Mostly by telling the truth within very narrow limits.
19:27You are one of five or six people at the top of the company.
19:31You report to the CEO.
19:33You sit on the executive committee.
19:35Your decisions affect 40,000 employees and millions of patients and shareholders around
19:40the world.
19:41Your total compensation is in the mid-seven figures.
19:44Most of it is in stock that vests over four years so you don't leave.
19:49You are the face of science at the company.
19:52You present at J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference every January.
19:56You give keynotes at major scientific societies.
19:59You are quoted in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
20:02When the company announces a new program, you are on the press release.
20:06When a program fails, you are on the earnings call explaining what went wrong.
20:10You have a communications team that trains you on messaging.
20:14You have a media coach who helps you with body language.
20:17You are not just a scientist anymore.
20:19You are a brand.
20:21You make the biggest strategic bets the company makes.
20:24You decide to pivot into mRNA technology or to exit neuroscience or to acquire a gene therapy
20:30company for $10 billion.
20:33These decisions are made in rooms with fewer than 10 people in them.
20:37They move billions of dollars.
20:38They change the lives of everyone at the company.
20:42They rely on information that is always incomplete and timelines that are always compressed.
20:48You make them anyway.
20:49You make them because that is what the job is.
20:53The people who cannot make these decisions do not get to this level.
20:57The people who make them badly do not stay at this level.
21:00You see things that most people in the industry do not see.
21:04Internal data on failed programs that never get published.
21:07The real reasons deals fall through.
21:09The actual cost of manufacturing at scale.
21:13The gap between what the company tells Wall Street and what is actually happening inside the labs.
21:18You hold this knowledge carefully.
21:20You use it to make decisions.
21:22You do not use it for personal gain.
21:24Because the SEC watches people at your level very closely.
21:28One trade based on material, non-public information.
21:32And you lose everything.
21:34Career over.
21:36Possibly prison.
21:38Level 9.
21:39The CEO.
21:41You are running a publicly traded pharmaceutical company with annual revenues of over $30 billion.
21:48You have 60,000 employees across 40 countries.
21:52Your products are taken by tens of millions of patients every day.
21:56Your decisions affect their lives in ways most of them will never fully understand.
22:01You make $25 million a year.
22:04You have a driver and a jet and a security detail at major events.
22:09Your calendar is not your own.
22:11It is built by three assistants who coordinate in shifts across time zones.
22:17Every 15-minute block is scheduled weeks in advance.
22:21You wake up at 5.
22:22You work out for 30 minutes.
22:25You read three newspapers and four industry publications before 7.
22:29You are in meetings from 7 until 7.
22:33You fly somewhere almost every week.
22:35You sleep on the jet.
22:38Your family sees you on weekends if you are lucky.
22:41Your spouse has adapted.
22:43Your children are grown or being raised largely by nannies and boarding schools
22:47and the ambient presence of enormous wealth.
22:51You testify before Congress twice a year.
22:54The senators ask about drug prices.
22:57They ask why a vial of insulin costs $300 in America and $30 in Canada.
23:03They ask why a year of your cancer drug costs $180,000.
23:09They perform outrage for the cameras.
23:11You perform patience for the cameras.
23:14You explain R&D costs.
23:16You explain the failure rate of drug development.
23:19You explain patent cliffs and generic competition.
23:23You do not mention the billions in stock buybacks.
23:26You do not mention the marketing budgets that exceed the research budgets.
23:31You do not mention the tax structures that route profits through Ireland and the Netherlands.
23:36These are the truths you cannot say out loud.
23:40Everyone in the room knows them anyway.
23:42The hearings end.
23:44Nothing changes.
23:46You manage activists.
23:48You manage shareholders.
23:50You manage the board that can fire you with a single vote.
23:53You manage the press when one of your drugs causes deaths that the company knew were possible.
23:59You write the apology letter.
24:01You read it on camera.
24:03You approve the settlement payments to victims' families.
24:06The payments are large to the families.
24:09They are a rounding error on the balance sheet.
24:12The stock recovers within a quarter.
24:15The patients do not.
24:17You stay in the role for seven years.
24:20That is longer than the industry average.
24:22You announce your retirement at an analyst day.
24:25The stock dips and then rebounds.
24:28The board thanks you in a press release.
24:31You leave with an exit package of approximately $80 million.
24:35The new CEO takes over.
24:38The strategy adjusts slightly.
24:41The machine continues.
24:43You buy a house in Florida.
24:45You buy another in Colorado.
24:48You join the boards of three other companies.
24:50You join the board of a hospital system.
24:53You donate generously to your college.
24:56They name a building after you.
24:58You attend the ribbon cutting.
25:00Students shake your hand.
25:01One of them asks what advice you have for someone starting out.
25:06You think for a moment.
25:08You say something about persistence.
25:10You say something about finding meaning in the work.
25:13The words are true.
25:15The words are also a script you have given before.
25:19The student nods and writes it down.
25:22Level 10.
25:23The Founder's Ghost
25:24You were not alive to see this.
25:27You died in 1923 in a house outside Philadelphia.
25:32Your grandchildren buried you in a family plot that is still tended by people paid through a trust you established.
25:38Your name is still on the building.
25:40Your name is still on the letterhead.
25:42Your name is still etched into the stone above the main entrance at headquarters.
25:47But you were long gone.
25:50You were a chemist.
25:51You were curious.
25:53You worked in a small laboratory above a pharmacy.
25:56You synthesized a compound that eased pain.
25:59You sold it to local doctors.
26:01They asked for more.
26:02You made more.
26:03You hired a partner.
26:05You rented a larger space.
26:07You turned your experiments into a business.
26:10You had no idea what you were starting.
26:13You were trying to pay your bills and do interesting work.
26:16That was all.
26:18The company grew.
26:19It survived two world wars.
26:21It survived the Depression.
26:23It survived patent fights and regulatory overhauls and the transformation of medicine itself.
26:29Your original compound is long obsolete.
26:32The drugs the company sells today would have seemed like magic to you.
26:36Monoclonal antibodies.
26:38Gene therapies.
26:39Cell therapies grown from a patient's own blood.
26:43You could not have imagined any of it.
26:45You also could not have imagined what your company became.
26:49A global conglomerate with thousands of lawyers.
26:52A lobbying operation that spends $30 million a year in Washington.
26:57A marketing machine that advertises directly to patients on television.
27:01A practice illegal in every developed country except America and New Zealand.
27:06A supply chain that reaches into villages you could not find on a map.
27:10A pricing department that calculates exactly how much each human life in each country can afford to pay to not
27:18die.
27:19You were a chemist.
27:21The company you started became something else.
27:23Your portrait hangs in the lobby.
27:26New employees walk past it on their first day.
27:30They do not know your name.
27:31They read it on the plaque and forget it by the elevator.
27:35The CEO mentions you in annual speeches.
27:38He uses your name as a shorthand for values, integrity, innovation, patient focus.
27:44The words are true and also not.
27:48Like everything at this scale, they are both at once.
27:52Somewhere in an apartment in a city you never visited, a young person is studying biochemistry.
27:58They are taking out loans they do not fully understand.
28:01They are memorizing pathways and mechanisms and reading papers late into the night.
28:06They want to cure cancer.
28:09They want to end Alzheimer's.
28:11They want their work to matter.
28:13They will graduate in a few years.
28:16They will apply to jobs at companies like the one you founded.
28:20One of them will hire them.
28:22They will swipe a badge at a door.
28:24They will walk into a lab.
28:26They will see a rack of 96 well plates waiting for them.
28:30They will have no idea what they are signing up for.
28:33The loneliness.
28:34The compromises.
28:36The slow narrowing of idealism into pragmatism, into cynicism, into something that is not
28:42quite cynicism, but is not quite hope either.
28:46They will learn the language.
28:48They will rise or they will not.
28:50They will stay or they will leave.
28:53They will sign their name on things they do not fully understand.
28:57They will be part of drugs that save lives.
29:00They will be part of drugs that do not.
29:03The machine will keep running.
29:05It always does.
29:07The cycle continues.
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