October 2001

At the start of the Michaelmas term, Hermione was again in her adviser's office being introduced to the new project. The grant was to study the ingredients used in central acetylcholinesterase inhibitors and to try to process or combine them differently to make the drug more effective and longer lasting. Professor Carter gave her the address and password to the project file transfer site and a project email address to use for the study. She would be working in Professor Carter's lab for any actual drug trials.

After finishing her other classes for the day, she sat down in her much improved graduate student dorm, which was significantly more like an flat than the undergraduate dorm. She had even sprung for one with a fireplace and had submitted the application to have it connected to the flue network the previous day. She opened her notebook computer and logged into the project email account. She was surprised to find an email already sitting there from the Parisian student.

Dear Colleague:

I am your counterpart at the UPMC in Paris. Please find attached research I conducted into memory restoring substances and their interactions during my previous studies. I trust that you will find the variety of substances to be quite unconventional, however, I am convinced that under the right conditions, they will prove to be critical to our joint project. I am completely committed to this project for personal reasons and endeavor to produce significant advancements in this field. However, due to these personal reasons, I would prefer if you would concede to communicating only under our initials.

D

P.S. I am fluent in English if that language is preferable for you. I am also fluent in French, German and Italian if English is not your native tongue.

Hermione was stunned. She opened the attached research file. There before her were none other than the potion ingredients that she had been researching over the previous three years mixed among other various Muggle compounds. Not only did it look like there was another student who had conducted professional level research, but it appeared that perhaps that student may be another wizard or witch. If that were the case, it was probably better that D wanted to communicate with initials only. Hermione was rather enjoying her anonymity in the Muggle world and decided that for the time being, it was better to be unknown.

Hermione spent that night cross-referencing her notes with D's thesis noting that D's was somewhat more comprehensive than hers in a few areas. She had a fair number of significant contributions, but it was clear that D had spent more time on cataloging the various properties and preparations of ingredients than she had. Looking through her research notes, she noted that she had more information regarding the processing and timing of ingredient combination.

She copied the ingredient listing into a new file and added her additional research to the document. She was about to add in her private notes about the preparations until she realized how foolish she would seem by including a moon chart if her counterpart were a Muggle. In the end, she saved the new inclusive document to her computer and uploaded an edited version of her Muggle-friendly thesis and decided to see what D had in terms of preparations. Before heading to bed she sent off her own email.

D:

I was most pleased to have received your email and research notes when I first logged onto the project site. I have transferred your research to a new document and added my own notes to your work. I noted that a good amount of your research overlaps with my own, including the use of unconventional ingredients. Also, uploaded to the site is my thesis work, which has a bit more focus on the preparation of the drugs. Please let me know of any additional insight you have. After reviewing our combined notes, I suggest that we each develop a set of hypotheses this weekend, which can be used to generate our list of experiments.

H

P.S. I concur that the use of initials would lead to fewer diversions at this time and therefore agree to your request.