The process of drug discovery is long and arduous. It's filled with also sorts of difficult challenges for chemists. Balancing potency against selectivity. Optimizing physical properties in order to produce compounds with reasonable pharmacokinetic profiles. Minimizing toxicity and drug-drug interactions. It's difficult to be both fast and successful....unless you work for Batman.
In Batman Begins (The first Christian Bale Batman movie, in case you forgot), our hero gets himself blasted with an aerosolized psychotropic agent of some sort when he confronts Dr. Jonathan Crane, aka The Scarecrow. Things go all Helter Skelter for Batman. It's not a happy trip like you might experience in a Beatles movie or an episode of Mad Men. After being set on fire and falling out a window, Batman puts himself out and escapes to a rooftop where his elderly butler, Alfred, can easily rescue him. Seems plausible.
In the next scene, Batman has been stripped of his bat-cape and bat-cowl and bullet-proof bat-suit, and he's lying in his bed in his decidedly unbatty PJs. He's Bruce Wayne again, and he's lucid. No more nasty drug-spawned visions for him. Alfred is there, but so is Lucius Fox -- head of Wayne Enterprises' Cool Products That Could Be Helpful If You Become A Nocturnal Super Vigilante Division. Bruce is a little surprised to see Lucius, because Lucius hasn't officially been let in on the whole Batman alter-ego thing. He gets over it quickly, though because Lucius is wise, helpful, and humble. Of course he is. He's portrayed by Morgan Freeman. We all learn together that Lucius is responsible for Bruce's recovery:
LUCIUS FOX: I analyzed your blood, isolating the receptor compounds and the protein based catalyst.
BRUCE WAYNE: Am I meant to understand any of that?
LUCIUS FOX: Not at all. I just wanted you to know how hard it was. Bottom line, I synthesized an antidote.
BRUCE WAYNE: Could you make more?
LUCIUS FOX: Are you planning on gassing yourself again, Mr. Wayne?
BRUCE WAYNE: Well you know how it is Mr. Fox. You're out at night looking for kicks. Someone is passing around a weaponized hallucinogen...
LUCIUS FOX: I'll bring what I have. The antidote should inoculate you for now.
In addition to being in charge of bullet-proof bat-suit construction and super awesome jet car development and maintenance, Lucius is pretty handy at drug development. In the course of just a couple days at most, he draws and processes Bruce's blood, identifies "the receptor compounds" and the "protein-based catalyst" (we call that guy an 'enzyme' in the Biz), hypothesizes an agent that will antagonize these materials, synthesizes it, establishes its efficacy in some model or other, and then injects it into Mr. Wayne, thus curing him. Ta Da!
I could spend this paragraph scrutinizing Lucius's remarkable achievement. I could point out that his ridiculous timeline benefited from the fact that he didn't have to jump through a lot of the time-killing hoops of drug discovery. He didn't have to run any clinical trials or satisfy any regulatory requirements, and for that matter, since his antidote was delivered by syringe, it didn't have to be designed to penetrate the gut. I could point that stuff out (maybe I just did), but I'd rather focus on what this accomplishment means and what Lucius Fox represents. He's the classic pop culture science guy.
The history of American popular culture is littered with folks like Lucius Fox. From James Bond's buddy Q to Iron Man Tony Stark to Gil Grissom to Abby Sciuto to Walter White, we have been provided with an archetypal super scientist/engineer who has a strong enough grasp of all fields of scientific inquiry to solve pretty much any problem that springs up that requires more brains than brawn. Create a super-intelligent nerd character and you can big brain your way out of any jam you might encounter.
Unfortunately, science doesn't generally work this way. An individual scientist might have a broad enough background to understand multiple fields, but he or she usually specializes in one. The process of drug discovery at which Lucius acquitted himself so admirably, requires buckets of skilled people with all sorts of different training. You need enzymologists, pharmacologists, cellular biologists, structural biologists, medicinal chemists and more. Within medicinal chemistry, certain research organizations (I can think of one that starts with a silent P followed by a big ol' noisy F) have decided that the process of thinking of molecules to make should be performed by people other than the folks that actually synthesize them. Except in the world of action heroes, spies, and uber-competent criminal investigation teams, Lucius Fox is a rare bird. Batman should be very grateful to have him. Any drug company would be.
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