BLIND TRIAL by Brian Deer (best books to read for beginners TXT) 📗

Luke went silent. That was another Luke thing. Street sounds from Lincoln Park. “Yeah, well, anyhow, they can’t fire you for any of that. And even if they can, so what?”

“So what is that scholarship they gave me. It’s a loan, remember. Not a grant. I got to work twelve months to write it off.”

“So why not go see that guy who chaired your interview panel. Theodore Something Whatever?”

“Yeah, right.”

THE HOTEL was dozing when Ben came off the phone. Those conference participants who hadn’t already left town were dining out in Georgetown and Adams Morgan. Ben headed to the elevator and rode to the lobby. Maybe he’d see Sumiko in the bar.

But he didn’t see anyone—at least who he knew. Only an MD he’d given a free iPad. No Theodore Hoffman: general counsel and asshole. No chief executive Marcia Gelding: “Ms. Marvelous.” No Gertrude Mayr: Dr. Doral. No Doctorjee: the fat guy. Everyone who was anyone was absent.

So where was this troupe who’d shouldered into his life? Not that he cared too much. He didn’t know these people. He didn’t want to know these people. And yet he sensed he’d soon know them well.

He returned to his room and asked reception to call Sumiko. But her number rang out. Where was she? He downed a vodka from the minibar, rolled a grass joint, and took a couple of hits to calm his nerves.

TNT was screening a Civil War epic. He sprawled on the bed and tried to follow it. Then he rose, gulped a Jack, and prowled the lobby, bar, and restaurant. He called her room again. Where was she?

At midnight he was back, cradling his Gibson. He probably shouldn’t have brought it to the conference. Here was the J-45—the “American Workhorse”—with the vintage sunburst finish. Solid spruce top, mahogany back and sides, rosewood fretboard and bridge. The choice of Woodie Guthrie, John Lennon, and Sheryl Crow. Kicking ass since World War II.

Strings bit his fingers as he picked an arpeggio. He tuned up his voice to the key. He coughed and hit a D for “Fifteen Years from Baton Rouge.” He was seventeen when he wrote the first draft.

Fire in the swamp; man says I set it.

Interstate chase on gator’s feet.

Sun’s going down; I’m twelve feet tall,

But, hey, what I done, it was nothin’ at all.

He didn’t finish the song. It made him feel worse. He returned his beloved Gibson to its case. Then he set the TV timeout, climbed into bed, killed the lights, and pulled a pillow to his chest.

SATURDAY JULY 19

Six

TRUDY MAYR sucked on a Doral Ultra Lite and blew at her reflection in a mirror above the desk where she’d sat for fifteen minutes. Smoking was prohibited—this was a hotel room—but who gave a damn for one morning? In thirty minutes, she’d head out to find the troublesome Dr. Honda. Mr. Hoffman said Marcia “insisted.”

The vaccine chief tapped ash into a saucer by her wrist, glanced at a taped-up smoke detector, and returned to a printed typescript.

Prevention of HIV-1 infection with WernerVac

A phase III double-blind placebo controlled trial

Wilson et al. She knew it like her hands. The New England Journal of Medicine was pressing for delivery if they were to get it to the peer reviewers on time.

Subjects (male n=17,254; female n=9,458) were assigned at random to receive either WernerVac 300 micrograms (n=13,308) or placebo (n=13,404) by intramuscular injection. An initial injection was boosted at six months.

She lifted a red ballpoint and corrected the text in a painfully tiny scrawl. She struck out “assigned at random,” inserted “randomly assigned,” and set the pen down beside the saucer.

The trial was unblinded at 102 weeks on the recommendation of an independent data safety monitoring board (DSMB) when a benchmark efficacy of >60% was demonstrated.

She found writing so difficult. Even with her right hand. Yet her left bore the brunt of her affliction. When her left hand wasn’t shaking like a dog’s paw scratching, the thumb and index finger trembled. Her specialist in Atlanta called it a “resting tremor,” but there was hardly an hour when she wasn’t being troubled by some aspect of Parkinson’s Disease.

That would do for now. She moved to the bed and looked at the back of her award.

Farragut Frames

$9.99

Cheapskates. Every last one of them.

The achiever’s award was a fiction. A sham. They’d printed it merely to parade her. They’d be running some scheme on the NASDAQ, no doubt. Today, they’d get the rumor going on Wall Street, most likely. On Monday they’d go short in pre-hours trading, before issuing a calming statement to the markets. “Speculation” about the vaccine was “premature,” they’d insist, and then they’d buy back their own stock.

She turned the frame sideways and tried to prize it open but quit when her cellphone rang.

“Ahh, Doctor Mayr, Doctor Mayr, Doctor Mayr.”

Would Doctorjee never let that rest?

His repetitions of her title were a childish amusement: his side of the antipathy between them. Ahead of her retirement in two weeks’ time, her office on the ninth floor of the BerneWerner Building had been stripped of seven honorary doctorates, twenty-two professional honors, the Lacey Prize for Science, and a letter from President Obama. In the Legal Department, on the sixteenth floor, the name “Gertrude Sharon Mayr” was filed on forty-one patents, including molecules, formulations, and adjuvants.

But her best regular qualification was a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Viraj Grahacharya, MD Pune, PhD UC San Diego, never missed a chance to score that point.

“Are you there, Doctor Mayr? You appear somewhat reticent.”

“Good morning. And how are the stars?”

“Most inauspicious, I’m afraid. Most inauspicious indeed. We are in need of your presence posthaste.”

Her celestial reference was aimed at his parentage. The Grahacharyas were of an astrologer sub-caste. While Trudy’s father, John Mayr, labored as a ferryboat engineer, hauling back and forth between Bodie and Hatteras islands on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Sandip Grahacharya gained media profile in 1969 for predicting “Mankind will never touch the Moon.”

“What?”

“What