While the characters and events in this story are entirely fictional, they are based on people and experiences I encountered in my long career doing medical research. Luckily, I never had to deal with a murder in the laboratory. I had the good fortune to work with amazing people whom I greatly admired. However, as with any endeavor, some of the people I interacted with were less than ideal. Like the victim in my story, I discovered that the published work of my mentor was irreproducible. As a result, I left his laboratory and took a leave of absence from graduate school at UCLA. In response, my mentor attempted to destroy my career by asking that my graduate status be terminated. Fortunately for me, courageous professors stood up for me and I eventually received my PhD from UCLA. 

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The research described in the novel was based on my work. Most of my research involved studying basic mechanisms of chromosome instability, which plays an important role in cancer cell progression and resistance to therapy. As a pioneer in the field, I explored mechanisms of telomere loss and their role in chromosome instability. At the end of my career I attempted to apply what I had learned to create a new approach to treating cancer. As in the novel, this involved the development of a high-throughput assay to identify compounds that could target cells experiencing chromosome instability . A preliminary small screen of 1832 compounds with known targets showed that the assay functioned as planned. However, I retired before I was able to perform a full screen of large chemical libraries. Thus, whether it is possible to treat cancer by targeting chromosome instability remains to be determined.