Book review: 'Cure'

Book: Cure
Robin Cook
Pan Macmillan
459 pages
Rs299

“In the mid-twentieth century you could do well in medicine, but you couldn’t become truly wealthy. All that changed when medicine in this country did not emerge as the responsibility of the government, like education or defence, as it did in most other industrialised countries. Add that to the US government’s inadvertently contributing to medical inflation by passing Medicare without effective cost controls... and by its patent office awarding medical process patents, like for human gene sequences, which it’s not supposed to do by law.”

This is the reason why respected doctor Ben Corey becomes a businessman, even breaks into a foreign university to steal a Japanese professor’s lab books so he can bring them back to the US and get a patent for Induced Pluripotent Stem cells (iPS). The professor, Satoshi Machita, first discovered an alternative means to extract the greatly beneficial and equally controversial stem cell, but got cheated out of the credit by his bosses at Kyoto University.

Disillusioned, he agrees to sell his work to iPS USA, Corey’s company, funded mostly by the Japanese mafia or the Yakuza.
But soon after Satoshi signs the contract, he collapses on a crowded subway platform, and ends up at the Medical Examiner’s (ME) office.

Laurie Montgomery-Stapleton, an ME who has just returned from an 18-month maternity leave, has something to prove to herself. What she doesn’t realise is that she’s something of a celebrity ME for having put an Italian mafia kingpin in prison. Doubting her ability as an ME after the illness of her new-born, Laurie takes on the case of the Japanese man. When the autopsy suggests that he died a natural death, she gets suspicious. The man had been in perfect health. The death was too random to have been natural.

And then she gets a threatening letter. So she goes out of comfort zone, and in pseudo-detective style, examines CCTV footage from the subway station and deduces that the Japanese ‘John Doe’ was murdered.

The plot is complex, with numerous sub-plots. Cure is also interesting for the dynamics of how the Italian mafia, American ganglords and Japanese Yakuza do ‘business’ together. But more effort seems to have gone into the politics and turf wars between inter-racial gangs, and the medical implications get the short shrift. In fact, disappointingly, nothing comes out of the stolen formula that can supposedly help produce artificial stem cells. This one lacks the ‘medical’ characteristics of a typical Cook thriller.