We have been trying to help people with heart disease for a while now. I think, while I drive to Squibb, which is a pharmaceutical industry company. As I walk in I see David, my partner, who is already there. People keep dying from heart disease and I feel we may be able to help them. We have been figuring out different ways but we have never actually found the cure.

I look at some of my work which is the Brazilian Pit Viper. We are studying the venom. We are doing this because the venom causes narrowing of blood vessels and increased blood pressure. I look at some of the reports of Brazilian Pit Viper attacks and figure out, the venom is the key! I find this because the venom would open up the blood cells and help the person with heart disease.

I feel myself gleaming with pride, but a little bit of fear comes from the back of my mind. We are going to have to work with venom. This could be disastrous. The venom can kill people, so if I put in the wrong amount of venom, the person that took it would die. I walk over to David.

“What are you working on?” I ask.

“Oh, nothing. Just thinking about how we could help with heart disease,” David says.

“Remember the venom from the Brazilian Pit Viper?” I ask.

“Yeah, why?” He says.

“That venom might be able to help people with heart disease,” I say.

“Are you really saying the venom could be the cure!?” He says excitedly.

He sounded very excited, “I’m not saying yes but maybe,” I say.

“We probably need to isolate it,” he says.

“Ok,” I say,weĺl try that first.¨

We start working on it. Eager as he is, David is still being very serious about this. This might actually lead to the discovery of a treatment for heart disease! We try at least thirty different ways. It takes around two weeks of trial and error but we keep persevering excitedly. Finally, after what seems like decades we try to purify then synthesise the venom and it works! We get very excited, but we need to figure out the amount of venom to put in a treatment. If we get too much venom the person that is using the pill would die. We keep adding different amounts of venom. We test it hundreds of times until we get the perfect amount of the treatment, which is 25 mg, to help people. We congratulate each other but we still need to be cautious because we want to make sure this works and people can use it safely.

We put the venom in a pill and decided to call it Captopril. It’s an ACE inhibitor which means it helps relax the veins and arteries to lower blood pressure. We also have to get a patent on it. This didn’t take long, luckily. We put Captopril in a pill, but we still need to get it FDA approved though. This took a long time because Captopril is venom, and the FDA wants to make sure it is safe. We finally got it approved and put it on the market in 1981, which we were very excited about. We still are anxious because what if it doesn work, then people would die. We have just created the first ACE inhibitor ever. David and I got the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research in 1999 for creating Captopril which is the highest award we could get.

After we created Captopril I got promoted to vice president of Basic Research. David and I keep working at Squibb, though Captopril was our only important discovery which helped hundreds of people.