The author adds a number of red herrings to throw a cloud of suspicion onto Cliff’s results but in the end portrays him as an eager and earnest go-getter with an explanation for everything.
Cliff’s star rises, and his postdoc coworker in the lab is featured in a profile in People magazine.Īs Cliff’s ego swells and Robin flounders at the bench, their relationship sours, but an obsession develops. Jubilation follows, a Nature paper is prepared and published, and Sandy Glass, the fast- and smooth-talking clinician counterpart to Mendelssohn, trumpets a new world order and the potential cure for cancer. Moving on, one winter morning when all hope for funding seems gone, Marion Mendelssohn, the primary investigator in the lab, joins a lab technician in the animal facility, where they discover that Cliff’s last round of experiments with “R-7,” a mutated RSV, actually melted away the existing tumors in nude mice.
The author does well in painting a picture of the competitive nature of a lab romance. Robin’s younger, hotshot paramour in the lab, Cliff, starts to have some breakthrough results using modified respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) to transform cancer cells into normal cells. Robin, the hard-working, senior postdoc in the Mendelssohn-Glass tumor biology lab, has been relegated to a boring, dead-end project profiling frozen tissue samples from cancer patients. To frame the story, a romance has blossomed among the petri dishes of the Philpott Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Intuition is a story about a case of potential scientific misconduct. Despite that fact, I think many JCI readers will find the book interesting, if not a little trite and predictable. The book was written for the public at large and not, like most books we review in the JCI, specifically for a scientific audience. After writing my last editorial on scientific misconduct ( 1), a colleague recommended that I read the recently published piece of fiction Intuition by Allegra Goodman, as it is a tale of whistle-blowing and its repercussions in a biomedical research lab.
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