Leaving the Pharm's Travis Belknap, a pharmacology PhD candidate at UCLA, is to be set for life—if he follows his plan. He'll graduate, get a job paying beaucoup bucks, and marry his fiancée, a fetching Eurasian woman from a megarich family. But the plan goes wobbly. Travis begins to question the ethics of the genome editing tools he studies.
That Travis is finally not the graduate school grind to succeed owes much to two friends he acquires: Rizwan Habeeb, a Muslim ex-convict who works as a bicycle mechanic, and Zara York, a McDonald's food preparer and Christian anarchist. Zara tags businesses she believes corrupt society while mocking her Christian values. These two friends of faith influence Travis, helping him see how biotech tools increasingly violate what they call God's—or Allah’s—handiwork.
How will Travis find his passion in a field increasingly abandoning its botanical beginnings with plants and herbs for an omnipotent, digitized world of drug design in silico on computer screens? Why does he help stench-bomb a marijuana dispensary? And how will Travis find work that feeds his soul? Travis shares his journey in Leaving the Pharm.
