The free world is struggling to absorb the news of a much-rumored one-button Apple mobile handset, the “i-Phone.” Cingular will support the device. It’s a quad-band phone, with GSM+EDGE, plus Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, SMS, CallerID, ring tones, conferencing and a calendar. IMAP and POP3 are supported, as is HTML formatting, web browsing (with Google Maps). The company renamed itself, dropping the word “computer” and christening itself “Apple, Inc.”

ClinPage takes extra allergy medicine every time we hear about Steve Jobs. Yes, he’s a visionary. But is he a supernatural being? We’re not convinced. Apple’s co-founder is being parodied here, but additional stylistic quirks can be gleaned here.

Still, Jobs may have a few things to teach the pharmaceutical industry. His out-of-the-box thinking might be a restorative tonic in pharma.

Suppose it’s 2017. Just pretend.

Imagine that a troubled global pharmaceutical company has lured Steve Jobs out of his professor emeritus status at Reed College. After retiring, Jobs had retreated to Reed to teach Japanese flower arranging and, as all the world knows now, to teach entrepreneurship in the third world. Jobs struggled to find a way to top the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but only until he began using video conferencing to lecture thousands of students at a time in China, Bangladesh and India.

A troubled drug company, however, makes Jobs an offer he can’t refuse. Its former CEO had just started a 3-to-5 year sentence in a minimum security U.S. prison. So Jobs takes the pharma’s top job (mostly, he says, out of disgust at what has happened to Apple after it was purchased by Samsung back in 2011).

Jobs spends a year in near-total seclusion, hiring professors from the University of Pennsylvania to teach him the industry. He disappears from public view.

• Then, suddenly, after a much-publicized rejection of one of his most promising compounds by the FDA, Jobs appears on “Oprah.” His new uniform: a white turtleneck and pink hospital scrubs with a drawstring waist. Jobs tells a weepy Oprah he had been taking the rejected medicine himself for 2 years—and experienced a complete remission of his second bout of pancreatic cancer. Patients start to buy an illegal version of the drug in Mexico instead. Oprah and Steve hug several times.

• Enraged, but hilarious at the same time, Jobs launches a personal attack on a 32-year-old board-certified oncologist at the FDA. Recently hired at the agency, she was the FDA reviewer responsible for rejecting his company’s new drug application (NDA). Jobs mocks the oncologist’s hair style, clothing and (with the most vigor) her mobile phone, one of the last Nokias ever manufactured before Samsung took over the market. (Ralph Nader comes to her defense, but she remains traumatized and decides to return to academia.)

• Emboldened by his Oprah appearance, Jobs testifies before Congress wearing the white turtleneck and khaki shorts. He lobbies for rollbacks to the much tighter FDA regulations that were passed after Democrats took the Congress and the White House in 2008.

• Jobs invents a new service supplied by his company, Medicare, Walgreens and Verizon. As a result, elderly Americans can be alerted on their iPhones to potentially harmful drug-drug interactions whenever they pick up their prescriptions. A grateful former blues guitarist in Mobile, Alabama, believes his life has been saved by the (free) service. He appears on the cover of People magazine and agrees to star in a Google-only movie that encourages senior citizens to get an iPhone and sign up.

• Just as Jobs haggled with record companies in the 1990s, he convinces IMS to help. That company’s participation more or less pays for the new i-Pill service by displaying ads tailored to individual patients. Samsung, for a while, feels left out of the party. Then it gives away 10,000 iPhones to the poor. The U.S. government is unprepared for the onslaught of demand and (on IT scalability grounds) refuses to roll the service out to anyone under the age of 50.

• At his company’s annual meeting in 2020, Jobs unveils newly designed drug packaging for every product in his portfolio. The FDA had been quite skeptical at first. But the RFID chips embedded in each bottle radically simplify the process of tracking drug safety in real time. The typography, colors, and logo are bold, luscious, easy to read. And gorgeous. The idea stuns the rest of pharmaceutical industry, which quickly duplicates it. The new packaging scheme was laboriously developed by a once-obscure graphic design firm in Copenhagen owned by three female Lebanese refugees. (After suffering under Jobs’s perfectionism for years, they quietly sell their firm to Glaxo and return to Beirut.)

• With Jobs’ help, each new drug label now has a clear, simple, branded URL featuring a new “med” domain name, like http://my.viagra.med. Each Bluetooth-ready “med” hyperlink allows patients to easily report simple side effects and pre-coded adverse events. Patients can also report positive health changes. All of the data at the site (combining feeds from patients, the manufacturer and the scientific literature) is curated by M.D.-PhD’s employed by the American Medical Association. And the whole service is monitored 24/7 by a new SEC-like federal watchdog agency tasked only with ensuring medical privacy.

• As Jobs delights in telling the journalists who sit at his feet like adoring children, the drug company’s lawyers had fiercely resisted the new labels. (The legal mumbo-jumbo and medicalese were gone, the lawyers fretted.) So Jobs fires every last one of the attorneys. He never looks back. That’s because his new marketing people (from Minneapolis, in another surprise) soon discover that each of the company’s blockbusters suddenly has its own web-supplied database of personal testimonials from patients whose lives have been improved by the product.

• In a special pull-out section of the company’s annual report, Jobs singles out specific scientists for praise. He includes vague, amiable speculation about when each of their projects will bear fruit, and how many millions of lives might be saved. There is a small photo of each scientist standing next to Jobs himself. Just as Jonathan Ive of Samsung was revered by iPod fans in years gone by, Jobs decides to make his scientists, well, not as heroic as Jobs himself—but as close to that as a living saint can handle.