A young woman is dying from a dangerous new strain of Hepatitis, unfamiliar to her doctor Andrew Jordan. A major pharmaceutical company is researching a drug that will combat the symptoms, and one of its sales reps, Celia, smuggles-out a sample of it, which saves the patient’s life. Andrew and Celia are drawn together by this experience, and they get married.

At the annual conference, Celia delivers a critical report about the company’s poor standards of training and ethical conduct, and is nearly fired by the company president Eli, until her line manager Sam intervenes on her behalf. Soon, Eli steps down through illness, and Celia is summoned to his deathbed, where he urges her always to follow her conscience.

Sam now becomes president, working closely with Celia, and launches two major overseas initiatives. One is an English unit, headed by Martin, a Cambridge scholar researching memory loss and dementia, from which his late mother had suffered. The other is a French project for an anti-emetic for use in pregnancy, called Montayne. Celia’s reservations about the Montayne project are so serious that she follows Eli’s deathbed advice and resigns her job, only to be called back when its alarming flaws are revealed. Not only was there a blackmail scandal involving licensing, but Sam had given the drug to his pregnant daughter, resulting in the death of his grandchild. Devastated, Sam commits suicide and Celia becomes president.

The company is having to endure a Senate Inquiry into the Montayne disaster, initiated by the corrupt Senator Donaghue. But it is also enjoying much prestige owing to the success of Martin’s team, which has developed a memory enhancing peptide. Also one of Celia’s rivals in the company, Dr. Vincent Lord, has discovered a free radical quenching drug of great promise, until it is revealed that some of the research was falsified, and Lord tries to cover it up. Senator Donaghue relishes this new opportunity to damage the company’s reputation… And we find that we already know the conclusion, revealed in the novel’s cryptic opening section.