Dave Sullivan
Northern News Services

Inuvik (Sep 10/01) - Scientist Kathleen Racher is a dedicated vegetarian. She was, that is, until moving to Yellowknife last November.

Kathleen Racher: She didn't like working for a pharmaceutical company

Soon after settling in, she earned a piece of paper that verifies her as a meat-loving true Northerner: the firearms acquisition certificate. Ice fishing is also part of Racher's new life.

"I just got right into it. There's something about the lifestyle. Everything just makes so much more sense up here," she says.

Pampered by the Vancouver climate and lifestyle where she grew up, Racher says she wasn't prepared for the North, but it seems she's quickly and happily adjusted.

When husband Marc was offered a job in the city as a habitat biologist with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the couple decided it was a good time for change. They were living in Ontario, where Racher carried out research for three years. Before that is was a year of research in Paris.

In the mid-nineties Racher immersed herself in the corporate world of pharmaceuticals, where pure research intersects with pure capitalism.

In the end though, she didn't want to be part of what drug companies do, because she believes they do it for the wrong reasons.

"I just didn't like working for a pharmaceutical company. I guess I'm just idealistic ... I'd become pretty dismayed."

Racher doesn't regret her chosen field of biochemistry, because a lot of good comes from that kind of research. She first got hooked many years ago by the idea of biological pesticide alternatives replacing chemicals which destroy every living thing in their path.

But "every time you get a big company involved, there's trouble. People are just trying to make money and bad things happen.

"I like money but I don't want to spend my life making money for big pharmaceutical companies."

Now Racher is much happier doing something that doesn't bother her conscience. She heads Taiga Environmental Laboratory, a low-key facility in Yellowknife run by the federal government. It tests water samples and just about everything else from across the North.

A lot of hard work she did before arriving in Yellowknife -- from a potentially lucrative patent belonging to her and two partners -- may pay off in the future. In 1995 the three set up a research company to help sick people. It does contract research for pharmaceutical companies.

The patent hasn't paid financially, at least not yet, because it is for a new test that could take years to become widely used.

"Although we hold the patent, the company has the first right to use that patent or not, for a number of years," says Racher.

There is a delay with using the patent because part of the company, Seale Pharmaceuticals, is for sale.

Racher, who holds a biochemistry PhD from hometown Simon Fraser University, isn't afraid to talk about ethics in science.

Take adding hormones to cows, for instance. That's being done to make them produce more milk. Racher logically points out there is no milk shortage.

"Down the line we'll find that it hurts people."

One of Racher's passions is communicating science to the public, "because it's the public who will make these decisions in the end."

Before graduating in 1996, Racher and partners started their research for pharmaceutical companies.

One Canadian company in particular wanted them to develop a protein hormone.

"So we found a way to do that for them. We just got known as people who did that kind of stuff."

Word spread.

"Another pharmaceutical company approached us and said 'we have this problem. We want to improve our diagnostics for ulcers, can you think of something.'"

Until then, the best way of detecting ulcers was by sending a video camera down patents' throats, to the stomach.

"They wanted a less invasive way," says the 34-year-old researcher.

The rest involves drinking sucrose-laced water, and finding it in the bloodstream. The sugar-type substance should only be present if there is a leak in the stomach, such as ones caused by ulcers.

Testing for sucrose is the hard part, but her team managed to invent a technique that can find it in a small blood sample. Before the team tackled ulcer diagnosis, many litres of urine were needed for a test. Using antibodies was key to the researchers' new and improved method. That's when they decided to break off from the university to form their own company.