John Murnane Author
Background
My new novel
A promising young woman researcher lay dead in the laboratory. Was it murder? Madeline Murphy, new to the Homicide Division, was determined to find out. Madeline has a lot to prove in her new position. She came up the hard way. Raised as an orphan by her foster mother, Maria, Madeline looks and relates to being Hispanic. Pealing back the layers of laboratory intrigue, Madeline, and her soon to be retired mentor, Eddie Rourke, quickly learn that even scientists sometimes have dark secrets. Relying solely on her college biology background, Madeline struggles to understand the complexity of DNA and its role in cancer, which becomes necessary to grasp the motive behind the murder. Everyone is lying, but who is the murderer? The boyfriend, who initially claimed he barely knew Evalyn, but was deeply hurt by her rejection and possibly out for revenge? Evalyn’s professor, who claimed her results disproving his earlier publications could not be trusted and who wanted to silence her? Or another postdoctoral fellow who was desperate to steal her recent breakthrough to salvage his waning career? Madeline and Eddie soon realize the case depends on finding Evalyn’s laboratory notebook. It not only contains her results, but also her personal notes on her life, and importantly, who she felt was snooping through her things and threatening her. Although Evalyn had hidden her notebook, a clue as to its location disguised as a DNA sequence could break the case. Could they solve the clue and find the killer?
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. I was also fortunate enough to make a major discovery while working in another laboratory on my leave of absence. This work was published in Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific journals. Using this work as the basis for my thesis, I eventually received my PhD from UCLA. One result of this change was that instead of becoming a virologist as I had intended, I ended up studying mechanisms of chromosome instability and their role in cancer.
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The research described in the novel was based on the work performed in my laboratory. 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 maintenance and instability. However, as with the project central to the novel, at the end of my career I developed a high-throughput assay to identify compounds that could target cells experiencing chromosome instability as a means of selectively killing tumor cells. A preliminary small screen of 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.