Under the Baobab Tree

I arrived at the manufacturing facility where my meetings were being held. Across the street was a industrial brewery. Next door was a Midas muffler suppler (not customer service place, the supplier). There were piles of black snow in the parking lots of these one story industrial buildings. The driver said, "are you sure this is the place?" Oh yes! This looks just right!

I walked in to the corrugated tin temporary-looking "office" building and walked into the coffee room where I saw three men. One nice big burly manly man and two scrawny men. I said, "ah, you must be my men?" They said they were. The manly man was the general manager of the manufacturing facility, scrawny man A was another lawyer, scrawny man B was a scientist. I asked the manly man, "Why is a Middleton a separate town from Madison and which was here first?" He did not know. I started looking for half-and-half for my coffee and he directed me to the non-dairy creamer. "How can you be in Wisconsin and serve me non-dairy creamer?" He said that was a good point and he hadn't thought of that before. He smiled like Santa Claus the whole time. He kind of looked like Santa Claus too, if Santa Claus were still in his mid-40s. I liked him very much.

Santa Claus looked out the window and saw someone coming across the parking lot. "This must be the fourth person you're waiting for? I'm guessing because he's in a suit and carrying a skinny suitcase which isn't normal around here." It was indeed our Fourth Man, another lawyer. He quickly removed his tie.

I kept chattering on about Middleton and what I had learned about Madison yesterday. I described my "Thank you, but I'm having butter" refrigerator magnet. I talked about the Dairy Queen in her milk-colored dress. I said Wisconsin earth is very black. He said, "yes! Our earth is very black. In fact, the next town to the West is called Black Earth, Wisconsin!" I said the place was practically swimming in agricultural products. I said I had consumed "locally sourced mustard" the night before at dinner, which was very good. "Ah! Mustard! Do you like mustard?" Santa Claus asked? Apparently there is a Mustard Museum in Middleton. I am SO disappointed that I didn't know that before because I would have gone there in an instant. I feel cheated.

We took our non-dairy creamer and went upstairs where we locked ourselves in a conference room for the next 8 hours. People came in to talk to us about a number of things mainly having to do with some Western Blot results. Our scientists taught us all about Western Blots and then we looked at a bunch of digital photos of Western Blots and we learned that they are washed in milk and then some sort of horse radish concoction and then they are laminated and pasted into a book. We looked at all the books. We learned everything there was to know about how to perform and read a Western Blot test.

We interviewed four separate people all about the blots. As one of us lawyers began to fade the other would pick it up and keep asking about blots. We asked about failed blots, successful blots, good blots, bad blots, missing blots, super-charged blots, wasted blots, and destroyed blots. At one point when I was leading the questioning -- the topic was proper methods for destroying failed blots -- I said something like, "so, you get a bad blot back and you toss it, destructamundo, and then you redo the sample, or the vial, or whatever you call it, right?" I turned to our scientists and said, to the side with a slight wave of my hand, "am I using the right terminology here?" meaning sample versus vial, of course. He looked at me and said, "destructamundo? sure."

We had lunch brought in and I ate four chocolate cookies the size of my head and one vegetarian sandwich (frowned upon in Wisconsin)

The room got hotter and hotter. Our "interviewees" got more and more technical. At this point we were talking about centrifuges and elutions and ELISA assays and prions. The room got hotter. Way hot. The receptionist came in and said my car was waiting to take me home. We finally stopped.

We walked across the hall to Santa Claus's office and said, "Okay, we're done." Done? he said? "Yes, we're all blotted out. Totally blotto." I guess he hears that all the time because he didn't laugh. He had an empty container of "mixed nuts" on his cabinet and I asked him if that was symbolic. He explained that people gave him empty "mixed nuts" containers all the time and while I was starting to giggle he said he kept bullets in them. Oh. Don't mess around with a manly Wisconsin man. He is a "competitive pistol shooter." I made some grammar jokes. "Are the pistols competitive? Or are YOU competitive?" Santa Claus told me he'd tell me all about it when I came back to visit the Middleton Mustard Museum. Our scientists laughed pretty hard at the competitive pistols and mixed nut containers.

I gave my a client a ride to the airport in my car and the whole way we talked to the driver about the Middleton Mustard Museum. Turns out he was from Osh Kosh. "Gosh! Osh Kosh!" I said. No response. ?! I asked him if Osh Kosh was on a lake. He said yes, Lake Winnebago. I asked him if Lake Winnebago was named after the RV or vice versa. He said neither, it was named after the Indian tribe. I asked him how big it was. He did not know. He said, 'that's pretty lame, I should know." I asked him if he could see across it. Yes. "So then it's less than 7 miles wide." "How do you know that?" he said. "The horizon is seven miles away so if it were wider you couldn't see across it." I have no idea if this is really true but I heard it somewhere once and amazingly every time I pull out this fact about how far away the horizon is, I turn out to be right. My driver looked on his GPS and said, "wow, you're right, it's 6.3 miles wide." How long is it? I asked. "Gosh! I don't know that either!" He said. So I continued -- is it more than 7 miles long? yes. Is it long like an eggplant or long like a baguette? "It's not that long, it has bumps. Like a pear," he said. A Bartlett pear or a Japanese pear? Silence. "Would you say it is more of a gourd shape?" Yes! It's a gourd shape. "You really know your lakes," he said.

So that settles that.

And as luck would have it, the Madison-Middleton-airport-Madison round trip means that I have now circumnavigated Lake Mendota. My work here is done.

P.S. My Dad reports that today is the anniversary of James Madison's birthday -- 1751.

After the war, he went to Madison, Wisconsin, on the GI bill with his young wife. He rowed for the crew team on Lake Mendota, cruised around the lake shores and the beautiful deep green farm lands in some big boat of an American-made car, occasionally went to class, and worked as a short-order cook in a cafeteria for the huge numbers of veterans at the university on the GI bill. In January of his first year in Madison, his wife gave birth to their first child, a boy, my Dad. The family story is that someone offered Grandpa a good deal on the cost of the birth if he would let the medical school students watch. So, he would claim in his later years, around the family Thanksgiving table, that my Dad was born in a giant medical school theatre with droves of red-faced Wisconsin youths looking on. My grandmother didn't know anything about it until it was over. She never forgave him.

Sixty-five years later I find myself here in Madison to check out a manufacturing facility that makes thrombin out of ground bovine lungs.

Madison is a little town built on an isthmus between two big, beautiful lakes (Mendota and Menona). The isthmus bends a little bit to make a very flat "V" shape of land. The state capitol building is at the point of the V. To the east along the isthmus are big old houses, long straight avenues, a big Kraft Oscar Meyer plant, and the Dane County Regional Airport. To the west along the isthmus is State Street which goes downhill and dead ends at the University which continues up Bascom Hill, which is a pretty steep little knoll on top of which stands Bascom Hall. It is at the same elevation as the Capitol building. They are the two high points of town. State Street is a walking street, closed to traffic. When the snow is down, you can sled down the Capitol hill straight down State Street all the way to the bottom where you will run into people sledding down from the top of Bascom Hill in the opposite direction. I imagine that sort of thing has been going on since the town was built, right before the Civil War.

To the north of it all is Lake Mendota which at the moment is frozen solid all the way across. My cab driver said that people cut across the lake on skis in the winter but don't skate because the ice is too bumpy. There is ice fishing and ice sailing. To the south is Lake Menona about which I know nothing.

The people here sound like the Norwegian Lutherans on A Prairie Home Companion. The local men are big and jolly and have red cheeks and solid frames and Viking-type hair and wear red and black plaid shirts and work boots and Carharts and smoke foul smelling cigarettes. My cabbie was this archetypal Wisconsin Man. I know he was an Archetype because he kept popping up all over town. The same man. I swear. He was my cabbie. Then later I saw him working as the cashier in the University book store. Then after that he ran over to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, where he was a docent, and later still he was working his fourth job at the State Historical Museum.

Madison is beautiful. So is Wisconsin. I spent four hours walking all around the University and the museums and learned the following:

• Madison is named after James Madison. Duh.
• Wisconsin used to be called New France. Duh.
• The soil here is black black black. Literally. Black. Not like the red clay or brown earth we have in Maryland.
• The cows are black and white. Never brown. Ever.
• John Muir went to the University here and this is apparently where he first fell in love with trees, etc. There is a memorial to him on a promontory over the lake on top of Bascom Hill.
• I have seen only white people since I arrived. Although a card in my room tells me that "Mohammed" is my "maid."
• The first use of the big field that is now the football field at Camp Randall was to recruit soldiers for the Civil War. Later it was a prison for Confederate soldiers. Later it was a drilling ground for WWI soldiers. In my grandfather's time it was used for ROTC. Now it is The Home of the Badgers.
• There's an entire book devoted to the Rock Shards of Central Wisconsin. It's a field guide to Indian spear heads and the like.
• The University seems devoted to water. There's a big ornate Victorian red brick building right by the water with big white brick letters on it that say Science Hall. Between that and the lake are two separate "water laboratories" and all the chairs at the student union along the lake were donated by a "water scientist" of some renown (don't remember his name). The airport has a big satellite photo of the little Madison isthmus surrounded by the lakes that happen at that moment to be suffering from a massive algae bloom that shows up as fluorescent green on the picture.
• There are lots of excellent second hand bookstores on State Street. I went into two. I saw all sorts of fabulous books and I almost bought a bunch until I remembered I already had all those same books at home.
• Students dress abominably and look too young to be allowed out without supervision. They are pupae. Without all their fingers and toes yet.
• I almost bought a book in the State Historical Museum that tells you how to distill almost anything from almost any kind of vegetable.
• I did buy a refrigerator magnet that says, "Thank you, but I'm having butter."
• The men in Madison, even the non-locals, are more manly than the men in DC. They have muscles and jaws and shoulders and they are weathered and alert and they speak in complete sentences.
• Madison was voted the Best Place to Live in America in 2003.

Madison seems very very safe. It is a beautiful little town nestled in the middle (literally) of two big beautiful lakes that are surrounded by county after county of lush, rich, dark green, fertile, productive, farm land. These beautiful green counties are themselves in between two much bigger beautiful lakes (Michigan and Superior) in almost the exact middle of North America, between two very big beautiful oceans (Atlantic and Pacific). Evil from abroad would have to come a very long way to get here. And why would it? To mess around with black and white cows on very black earth? To sabotage the satellite photo of the green algae bloom? To try to convert the butter people to margarine?

It must have been a strange thing for Grandpa to come here after flying bombing raids out of Northern Africa. So quiet and still and bucolic. A town buried between two hills that are between two green lakes, under a green tree canopy under a big empty sky. It's like the Shire in Middle Earth. In the late 1940s, it was a village with some university people on the top of one hill and some politicians on the top of the other hill and students and farmers and GIs goofing off and messing around on the lake in between the two, eating wholesome Wisconsin cheese and fruits and grains and swimming in the clear lakes and walking in the beautiful deep green mossy woods and bobbing for apples and everything else. You can imagine them dancing to big band music on summer evenings, and watching movies in the Orpheum Movie Theatre on State Street, and shopping at the Woolworth's and the Sears and the Kresge's Dry Goods that were also on State Street. The Wisconsin Dairy Queen parade went down State Street every year, with the Most Beautiful Girl in Wisconsin crowned the Dairy Queen and dressed up in a beautiful, shimmering, milk-colored gown. All the many churches are on State Street, too. In fact, there really wouldn't be much reason to leave State Street (I haven't yet).

Maybe that's why Grandpa came here.

I am here to attend the International Conference on Drug Development which takes place every year in Austin. So tucked away in one tiny corner of The Number 1 Golf Destination in Texas are a handful of FDA officials (including the Commissioner), a handful of big pharma executives, a handful of biotech executives, a very nice man from The Gates Foundation, a handful of people from the UT-Austin College of Pharmacy, and me. I am the only lawyer. I am the only girl. I am the only one not saying anything. My fellow conference goers are all scientists and they are one-up-ing each other on their qualifications. "Oh yeah? Well I'm an epidemiologist AND a pathologist!" "Really? I discovered levaquin BEFORE I cured every African infant of river blindness!" Etc. I am sitting in the back next to the tech support guys squinting at the slides that show all kinds of disgusting diseases and little blobs of amoebas and microbes. I practice trying to say the long complicated scientific words silently to myself and then wait for the speaker to say them too so I can see if I was right.

The speakers have no idea there is a non-scientist among them. Today a Pakistani pharmacometricist (I think that's what he said he was) waved out at the audience and said, "and, of course, you all know the story of Fix-it-All (chemical name, fixitallupomycin), so I don't have to remind you all that it was the first inverted-purple-goo-eating-spiral-form-parthenogenetic-doo-hickey to treat pediatric piano leg syndrome." That's what it sounded like to me, anyway. I took notes feverishly like I haven't done since college. Scratch that -- I never took notes in college. I took notes feverishly like I haven't done since I was a baby lawyer.

I learned a few things about drug development -- such as the fact that FDA is considering opening a review division devoted exclusively to neglected tropical diseases -- but I was surprised to learn how many other useful, sort of mundane, and unexpected facts. Such as:

• The Chile earthquake moved the Earth's mass enough to permanently shorten the length of each day.
• The first quantum machine nano-thing is so small it can never really sit still, from a molecular perspective, and so is literally in two places at once.
• We had the first successful full facial transplant in 2010. Somehow I missed that.
• Health care reform and government settlements combined will cost the pharmaceutical industry $5.4 billion in 2011.
• Every dollar a pharmaceutical company spends on those annoying TV ads generates $4.20 in sales.
• FDA has approved only two new antibiotics since 2008.
• The last new TB treatment was approved 40 years ago.
• 97 out of every 100 newborns this coming decade will be born in a developing country.
• Unipolar depression is number 3 on The Gates Foundation's list of diseases that impose the highest public health burden on low- and middle-income countries. Number 9 is road accidents.
• 86 percent of all unipolar depression trials fail. 50 percent of those trials are in drugs already on the market.
• There is a disease that has a"'prevalence of zero." The FDA epidemiologists thought that was very funny and laughed uproariously about their scientific joke. (The lawyer equivalent is the story about the lawyer who demanded that his associate find him the pattern jury instruction for promissory estoppel. HA! HA! HA!) But the disease that has a prevalence zero is not very funny -- it's terrorism-induced anthrax.

I also made a long list of things to learn more about:

• What is Muckle-Wells Syndrome?
• What is Maroteaux-Lamy Syndrome? 
• What is Prader-Willi Syndrome?
• What does the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases in Singapore really do and how do I found out if it needs any help?
• Master the topic of CMS J codes (consider delegating this one)
• Look up the African Vaccines Regulatory Forum
• Learn more about MenAfriVac, the first vaccine ever developed in the third world (meningitis in the Sahel).

And I decided on a good project to pass the time. FDA complained that the natural history of rare and neglected diseases is not well known. I've had a few rare and neglected diseases myself, courtesy of my childhood in the developing world. Bilharzia, giardia, malaria, etc. I could write a natural history of a rare or neglected disease! That would be fun! Like the story of the anopheles mosquito during the building of the Panama Canal. Or the story of ebola getting into a CDC research facility -- accidentally. Or our very scientific efforts to avoid contracting "hoof and mouth disease" in Zambia (answer, drive your vehicle through a thin soupy puddle and get out and swish your shoes around in it -- all for naught anyway because you don't get sick from it unless you are a cow (ergo, "hoof" and mount disease). I could travel around with a butterfly net catching neglected microbes. I could sit at bedsides and ask wilting patients things like, "but how do you FEEL?" I could wear a silly hat. It would be fun.

I would bring someone else along with me to do the science part, of course. Maybe the Pakistani pharmacometricist.

I have two more days of this so think how much I'll have learned by then!

P.S. There is no pattern jury instruction for a promissory estoppel claim. You are not entitled to a jury at all.

One Day, Three Meals, Two Old Friends, and 40 New Ones

It started on Tuesday morning. I woke in DC to 1.25 inches of thick ice coating everything. The ice was so thick on my windshield that I broke two prongs off my ice scraper trying to make the car drivable. I scratched a little view hole in the front, a little view hole in the back, and drove to Union Station with the windows open so I could see out the sides. I left the car at Union Station still all covered in ice. I hoped it would melt.

I met my colleague in Penn Station in NY and we were dismayed to find the rain pouring down outside. We went to the taxi line. The powers that be have removed our favorite "secret" taxi line on 33rd Street that had a nice plastic covering. Now the only taxi lines are on 7th Avenue and 8th Avenue in the open, no protection from the weather. And they are long lines. We had no choice but to go stand out in the pouring rain. We just stood there, getting very very wet. There was nothing to do. My colleague was wearing heels and stockings and she was very miserable. I was wearing knee high boots but I was still very miserable. Our hair flattened and began to drip. We looked at each other, grimly. I said, "I can't really believe this. Doesn't it seem like someone should have done something about this by now? This must happen all the time." My colleague agreed. "Yes. How can they let us just stand out here in the rain. It rains all the time in NYC." I said, "where are the station employees or something who would fix this? Where are the little men." We continued to stand glumly in silence.

By the time we got to our client we were utterly and completely soaked and frankly, we looked horrible. Four hours later we were done with out witness and we went back outside on the street and….stood in the rain again. We had ordered a car but it had not arrived. I refused to walk to my hotel in the rain. My colleague refused to do anything in the rain. Stasis. By the time I did get to my hotel, I was again totally soaked.

But my hotel was a marvel! It has only been open one month in NYC and it was absolutely splendiferous -- I got a nice guided tour of my room which included a huge bathroom mirror with a flat screen TV embedded in it that you didn't see at all until it turned on. The bedroom had a 3D TV which was a little weird. I was very very happy. Not only that, but I had failed to pack sleeping gear so I walked to Macy's to find they were having a 40 percent off pajama sale. Hooray! Brand new fabulous pajamas in my fabulous hotel room. I was much happier than my colleague who was still trying to get back to DC in the ice and rain.

The next day it was still raining but I did not mind. I had a long lovely breakfast with a very old college friend in my hotel -- in a vast, shiny restaurant with windows overlooking Fifth Avenue. It is very rare for NY hotels to have restaurants with windows. We had a fabulous time. I ate buttermilk pancakes and she had salmon eggs benedict and we gabbed away about everything from the new generation's relationship with feminism to our changing relationship to work as we enter our 40s. She told me that our favorite Cuban restaurant up at school had closed. This depressed me tremendously. I stared at her agog. "No more La Rosita's?" No. "What do people at Columbia eat, then?!" We ate mounds of toast and drank pots of coffee. The staff was fabulous. We stayed until almost 11.

Then I hiked 20 blocks up town (in the drizzly rain) to have lunch with an old law school friend. He emerged from his office building and said, "you look the same." I said, "so do you." This friend of mine and I had studied for the bar together after law school and our routine then had been go to Bar Bri class, eat lunch at a Chinese restaurant, go to a Barnes & Noble and study the rest of the afternoon, have dinner at a Chinese restaurant, play tennis at night because it was too hot in NC to play tennis during the day, then we'd jump in the pool around 11 or midnight, cool off, then start all over the next day. So there we are standing on Park Avenue in the rain and he says, "what do you want for lunch? Chinese?" " Of course," I said.

So we dawdled over lunch until 3 p.m. -- talking about our changing relationship to work as we enter our 40s and the struggle to find time to do thinks for fun. Also, the odd professionalism of the younger generation. My friend's version -- "So, you see all this stuff here that you did?" "Yes," says the minion. "Well, it's wrong. All of it." "Uh-huh," says the minion. "So, you need to go do it all over again. But correctly." "Okay!" says the minion. My friend scratches his head. "Where's the shame?" I say. We nod sagely. He talks about all the neighborhoods around NY and how he doesn't feel like he fits in to any of them but has to live in certain places for his kids' schools. "Those people aren't like us, Kim." "I suppose not," I say. "Where are the people like us?" he says. "I don't know -- what are people like us called?" "I don't know." Sigh. So we talk instead about books and painting and we practice speaking Chinese to each other and then we leave and go get big mugs of tea and walk around in the rain and then it's time to be done with lunch.

I walk the 20 blocks back to my hotel and on the way I visit the renovated Morgan Library. This is a fabulous institution -- Pierpont Morgan's library and his annex and his art collection. The building is fabulous. His library has 14,000 rare books and you can stand in the library and look at them. I saw several editions of Bleak House, the collected works of Stendhal, all of Thackeray, etc. He also has a Gutenberg Bible and one of the original copies of the Declaration of Independence. And he has original manuscripts by Bach and Chopin and the original galley edits of John Milton and original Babar the Elephant drawings and a huge collection of children's book illustrations and Degas prints and all sorts of eclectic lovely things. He has a folio version of Chaucer open to "Whan that apprill with the showres sought…." I intoned it quietly to myself and people thought maybe I was the little crazy lady in the wet coat and the flat hair. He has beautiful botanicals of a scientific expedition to the Caribbean circa the time of Sir Francis Drake.

His study is magnificent and is an excellent model for every library that people nowadays paint in "Library Red." Morgan's red though is original Venetian silk damask paper with a lily and mountain design. His coffered ceiling was shipped piece by piece from Venice in a boat. His desk was built by hand for him in London. The glass in the windows were gathered in bits and pieces from mountain sides in Italy somewhere.

I love the Morgan library. I went to the Morgan Library book shop and bought several postcards of hilarious children's illustrations, including the famous etching of Rudyard Kipling's elephant getting his trunk stretched out by the crocodile in the Great Grey Green Greasy Limpopo River All Set About with Fever Trees. Also a lovely painting of the owl and the pussycat sitting together in a boat, clearly mightily irritated with one another. And a girl giraffe saying to a boy giraffe, "I've had it up to HERE with you!" And a big sign that says, "Stop and Think" and two New Yorker characters standing in front of it saying, "It kind of makes you Stop and Think, doesn't it….?" And a set of cards that say Happy Holidays and depict a table at which the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, The Statute of Liberty, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and a Hallowe'en Witch are all seated, with a plumb turkey walking in front of them.

Then I walked 20 blocks back up town to a dinner with 40 people I had never met and who turned out to be riotously funny. It was a dinner to celebrate the fact that one client of mine had purchased another client of mine. The two CEOs were there and they were hysterical. The BDO Siedman guys were there, including James the Italian Accountant from Brooklyn, who was hilarious. And a baby lawyer who worked on the corporate side who was hilarious and turned out to be in the same bowling league with James the Accountant. And two amiable chemists who turned out to know all about my Great Uncle Tom's discovery of colorfast dye for nylon, which was tres helpful during WWII what with all those camouflaged parachutes and all. And they had all grown up in Flushing, too, how funny. And the head deal lawyer is a semi-professional show jumper on the side so we traded pictures of our respective horses and I told everyone that men who show jump are kind of like professional ice skaters -- you know, not really that manly -- where people who foxhunt are like Bode Miller and Peekabo Street and other extreme skiers. You can imagine how that went over. And Doug the CFO who was so jealous of our table (which was the best table) that he and one of the CEOs crashed it during the dessert course. The CEO kicked James the Accountant out of his chair and drank his coffee and ate his cake, all with great gusto. Doug the CFO switched his entrée with my entrée and so I sat with the other CEO and learned he was tragically unhappy and had no friends and not time to read or paint or do anything fun….so I reprised my conversation with my law school buddy and voila -- CEO number 2 was so happy he drove me home to my hotel and bought me a ginormous bottle of Carbernet. One of the corporate guys decided I was so funny that I should move to NY and go on stage. I am pretty funny some times.

The next day, as I trained home to DC, James the Accountant and the Baby Lawyer and the CFO and CEO number 1 and CEO number 2 and I all decided on email that we need to go neon bowling the next time I'm in NY. I'm thinking of bringing my law school friend along for kicks and giggles and to prove that making 40 new friends in one night isn't that hard after all -- it just means that every now and then you have to not go home to Scarsdale.

Because it turns he will never find the "people like us" that he is looking for in Scarsdale -- we are not in Scarsdale. We are in fancy hotels and the renovated Morgan Library and cozy NYC Chinese restaurants and at raucous, gregarious financial dinners and on horseback careening around the countryside.

At least that's my perspective.