Book Review: Brain

This book reminded me why I started reading Robin Cook in the first place. Medical fiction, fast paced thriller, enough jargon to make me feel just the right amount of ignorant, and what I have come to believe is Cook’s forte even more than fiction- professional ethics.

In this book, Cook brings to fore the dimension of advancement at the cost of human lives and the ethics of experimentation on animals and humans. The story cover a middle aged doctor in an administrative position, who realises that he loves research and medicine more than he loves administrative tasks. A journey of self discovery after his failed first marriage has led him to recognise the need for a balanced life. Simultaneously balancing his path breaking research, Dr Martin Phillips is also managing a developing relationship with his junior, Dr Denise Sanger. He is on the brink of both sides of his life facing success. In the process of chasing prospective cases to study, he ends up uncovering a huge plot of using unsuspecting patients for clinical trials of radiation. The number of people involved is far too many and the last fifty odd pages would have you reeling with the pace of developments in the story. But the book is gripping from the beginning and it is a little difficult to stop reading it once you start. Without a doubt, one of his better creations. The only trouble I had was the frequent changes in the names used for the same characters which had me all confused.  

I feel that the epilogue should be used in medical schools even today, to remind people the boundaries that researchers have transgressed, and the appalling way in which informed consent is sought. In the background, there are stories of racism, and poverty in America and how middle class professionals can be insulated from recognising the differences that privilege can bring with it. Another important story is the role of the state in promoting ruthless advancement in the name of establishing national superiority through defense and sciences. More often than not it is some mad cat scientist, or a capitalist corporate house that is shown to be the perpetrator. Yet here, the role of the state in not just ignoring but promoting, at the risk of lives of citizens, is brought out. I am wondering if there was ever any consequence of his ‘created’ stories of involvement of the state in crimes against humanity.

He ends his book by stating that we should wake up before the lines between fantasy and fiction and facts are blurred. I am wondering, four decades later, if we have woken up.