Can't wait for the whacking

By Michael Harris

July 13, 2003 12 AM PT

Michael Harris is a regular contributor to Book Review.

Medicine in literature doesn’t have to be boring. Think of the mesmerizingly detailed operation in Cormac McCarthy’s “The Crossing” (rifle bullet in a boy’s chest, rural Mexico in the 1930s, no anesthetic). But Robin Cook, who helped launch the medical-thriller genre a quarter-century ago with “Coma,” evidently lacks confidence that stem-cell research and therapeutic cloning -- the hot-button issues at the center of his latest novel, “Seizure” -- are enough to keep us turning the pages. His message, in fact, is reassuring: With suitable oversight, these scientific advances needn’t scare us at all.

So what’s a thriller writer to do? In the case of “Seizure,” Cook piles on melodrama that has nothing to do with the issues, shifting them to the periphery. He brings rogue fertility doctors into the picture, as well as the Mafia and the Shroud of Turin. He spends much time describing the logistics of air travel and the decor of luxury hotels. He affects the conventions of the ticking-bomb type of thriller: Each chapter has an exact date and time, such as “9:51 a.m. Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2002,” though it wouldn’t make any difference to the story if it were 7:38 p.m. Friday.

The action opens in Washington, D.C., with a Senate hearing on a controversial new procedure patented by Dr. Daniel Lowell. It’s likely to be banned: The head of the relevant committee, Sen. Ashley Butler (a “Gone With the Wind” moniker if there ever was one), is the darling of the Religious Right. What nobody knows is that Butler has just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Lowell’s procedure -- involving the transplantation of stem cells with healthy DNA -- promises a cure. Butler offers a deal: Cure me, and the ban will die in committee. Then Lowell will be able to get funding before his start-up firm goes bankrupt.

Cook hasn’t forgotten the novelist’s first rule: Every character has to want something. Butler wants to maintain his grip on health and power. Lowell wants wealth and fame. Lowell’s lover, Dr. Stephanie D’Agostino, wants to distance herself from her family’s ties to organized crime. D’Agostino’s brother, Tony, has sunk $100,000 of his own money and $100,000 of the mob’s into Lowell’s company. Tony’s indictment for racketeering has scared other investors away -- as has the opposition of those who view therapeutic cloning as tantamount to abortion. Yet if the company fails and the mob isn’t repaid, Tony warns, somebody will get whacked.

The Mafia subplot is one of two large, smelly red herrings Cook drags across our path. The other is the Shroud of Turin. Butler, in a fit of megalomania, decides that the DNA in the stem cells that will be implanted in his brain has to come from Jesus Christ himself -- from the bloodstains on the shroud. More dickering ensues: Butler offers to introduce legislation to help shield the Catholic Church from sex-abuse lawsuits. Lowell and D’Agostino, convinced that the shroud is genuine, travel secretly to Italy to collect sample fibers.

Then Butler is whisked to the Bahamas, where the experimental, unlicensed procedure can take place without fear of the law. The site is a fertility clinic that guarantees Lowell a supply of fresh human eggs -- a source of the stem cells into which Christ’s DNA will be inserted. The clinic’s owners want things too: cash, the prestige of associating with Lowell and a chance to learn enough about the procedure to fake it for profit. D’Agostino, whose conscience periodically troubles her, also suspects them of wanting to get into reproductive cloning -- making copies of people, with all the creepiness that implies.

Therapeutic cloning, the use of stem cells to treat injuries and degenerative ailments, is quite another matter. Cook denies that embryos are killed to obtain such cells -- the anti-abortionists’ fear. Yet he seems unwilling to explore the real-life debate over stem-cell research or the sources of opposition to it. He makes Butler (who resembles Jesse Helms) a renegade Democrat, though Democrats of that ilk are pretty much extinct.

We take it on faith that Cook knows his medicine. But the medical parts of “Seizure” too often sound like D’Agostino does here: “Pack it up with the usual HTSR reagents, plus the collection of dopaminergic gene probes and growth factors I put together. And ... include the ecdysone construct with the tyrosine hydroxylase promoter we used with our recent mouse experiments.”

Cook is a clumsy prose writer and, at best, an indifferent novelist. It’s obvious that he knows no more about the Mafia than we do. Yet if we have to choose between the M.D. jargon above and a hit man named Gaetano whose neck hairs prickle with obscene excitement as a whacking draws near, we’ll go with the hit man every time. Cook seems to realize this. Anything to keep us out of that operating room.

From ‘Seizure’

“How in God’s name do you get a needle into someone’s brain?”

“A little hole will be made through the bone. The approach ... will be prefrontal.”

“Prefrontal? That’s more doctor gobbledygook.”

“It means through the forehead. .... [T]here will be no pain.”