The Messenger

2

If This Is True

FLAGSHIP VENTURES SUBLEASED SOME SPACE FROM A biotech firm in Cambridge for a “clean room”—an area designed to keep out contaminants so experiments wouldn’t be tainted. It was in a basement, through double air-locked doors. You had to close the first doors before opening the second, to keep the dirty air from the hallway out of the clean room. A pressurized ventilation system filtered out whatever air did get in. Through the second doors was a modest-sized windowless room. When Jason Schrum arrived there in the fall of 2010 it was completely empty, save for one ventilation hood, a brawnier, more sophisticated version of the hood you’d find over a kitchen stove.

That summer, Schrum, then in his late twenties and resembling the ...