Jane Glasson and Filippo Crosetti’s collaboration

Jane Glasson and Filippo Crosetti’s collaboration links the commercial rise of Harkness Pharmaceuticals to the company’s concealed research and to the dispute over Jack Harkness’s plans. Crosetti is the chemist behind Elixtris; Jane works closely enough with him to share authority, arguments, and decisions about what the company is doing. Their partnership is not simply a professional route to commercial success: as the story reveals more of their work, it becomes a strained alliance over whether a project conceived as protection against disaster has become a danger in its own right.

From Elixtris to a wider research program

Crosetti enters the company’s history as a pharmacological prodigy working at the dedicated research laboratory in Locarno. His succession of beauty products helps Harkness Pharmaceuticals become internationally prominent, culminating in Elixtris, the anti-ageing cream whose 2009 release makes the company a major source of wealth. Jane’s connection to Crosetti emerges later, through the investigator’s discovery that she is speaking with him by phone. The call ties her to the chemist and to a separate, urgent concern: they discuss a woman who must be their priority and the plan to keep her isolated. This glimpse places Jane and Crosetti in active communication before the nature and full scale of their shared work are clear.

The later investigation gives the collaboration a corporate dimension. Crosetti is an employee of Harkness Pharmaceuticals, not an outside consultant, and Jane, addressed in this context as Astrid, represents the company with his full authority. Together they are associated with a broad range of research projects in nanotechnology and bioelectronics, fields with no obvious connection to developing or improving pharmaceutical products. Crosetti’s position as a chemist does not make the purpose of that work self-evident; when asked for its chemical application, he does not supply an explanation. The contrast between the company’s celebrated beauty products and these apparently unrelated projects makes their collaboration a route into the story’s larger mystery.

Shared responsibility and concealed funding

Crosetti and Jane are connected not only by scientific work but by decisions about resources. Investigators identify Crosetti as having resourced the projects and say that Jane represented the company in doing so, with his full authority. They also suspect that he served as a conduit for a vast package of additional funding without an apparent booked source, which they believe Jack Harkness may have arranged. These are presented as suspicions, not established proof of what the money financed. The distinction matters: the investigators can trace unusual research and opaque funding, but the precise purpose remains hidden.

That uncertainty sits within a company already facing allegations about money diverted through subsidiaries of shell companies and bribes allegedly paid to doctors. The investigators cannot account for most of the billions they believe may have been taken, and the Nightingale account is only a small, separate lead. Those allegations do not establish that Jane and Crosetti participated in the alleged diversion. They do, however, sharpen the significance of their own obscure research budget: the partnership operates inside an organization where legitimate-looking corporate structures, unexplained funds, and hidden purposes are difficult to disentangle.

Disagreement over the project

In private, Crosetti describes the undertaking as a big-picture measure intended to provide insurance against disaster. His language suggests that he and Jane have understood their work as a contingency, but it also exposes the moral pressure behind it: the project is not ordinary pharmaceutical development, and its consequences could be difficult to justify if disclosed. Jane reassures him that they have done the right thing. Their exchange shows a shared history of commitment, while Crosetti’s fear that the work will not appear right if exposed shows that reassurance cannot settle the problem.

The disagreement turns on whether Jack Harkness is about to force the project forward. Crosetti suspects that Harkness has made his move while Crosetti is away from the laboratory dealing with Ingrid Denner’s investigation. He believes Harkness will not wait for the collaborators to decide that the project should never proceed. Jane challenges the certainty of this explanation, and Crosetti answers that he can make no other account fit the circumstances. Their argument makes the partnership’s limits visible: they share information and a history of debate, but Crosetti is alarmed and increasingly certain while Jane presses him to distinguish inference from fact.

A decision to act together

Crosetti recalls that he told Jack Harkness from the beginning that the project should be a last resort, undertaken only if no other way remained. He now says that he no longer believes it is necessary and thinks Jane has reached the same conclusion. Her brief response leaves some uncertainty about whether she agrees as fully as he assumes. Yet when Crosetti asks whether they must stop Harkness if his suspicion is right, Jane eventually says yes. They decide to go to Harkness Pharmaceuticals headquarters as soon as possible, taking a taxi from Bürkliplatz as the quickest route.

Their decision is a consequential change in the collaboration: the two researchers move from arguing over the project’s justification to attempting to prevent Harkness from deciding its fate alone. It does not resolve what the project is, what disaster it is meant to avert, or whether Crosetti’s account of Harkness’s intentions is correct. Instead, their alliance becomes an intervention under uncertainty. The shift gives their shared work its central dramatic tension: authority and cooperation have enabled the research, but the same collaborators now face the possibility that cooperation means stopping the enterprise they helped sustain.