Great story about the development of Merck’s novel action sleep drug…

From: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/09/131209fa_fact_parker?currentPage=all

The Big Sleep

A woman recently posted online a description of her Ambien experiences:

• Ordered 3 pairs of saddle shoes from eBay
• Sexted my best male friend who is married. I have a BF as well
• Ordered $35.00 stylus off of amazon, I must have thought it said $3.00 or something
• Played draw something w/my friend and drew penises and rainbows for every word
• Tried to legally change my name on the computer

[…..]

Since the seventies, Stanford sleep scientists, led first by William Dement, had bred narcoleptic dogs. This was an achievement in itself. The animals suffered from extreme daytime sleepiness and had a propensity for mid-coital collapse: at moments of high emotion, the dogs, like narcoleptic humans, experienced sudden muscle weakness, or cataplexy. The first Stanford dog was a poodle named Monique. Later, there were other breeds; the Stanford colony, mostly Dobermans, had eighty dogs at its peak. Narcoleptic dogs gave birth to narcoleptic puppies; the disorder in canines has a single genetic cause. In 1999, after a decade-long search, a team led by Emmanuel Mignot, a researcher at Stanford, located the damaged gene, and reported that it encoded a receptor: the same one that had just been identified by the work done in California and Texas. Narcoleptic dogs lacked orexin receptors.