Their arrogance, fed by their profit appetite, was the motivation to disregard public need and trust while corrupting scientists and clinicians in the health care community. They were marketing this drug in third world countries and using falsified data to then be able to use this drug in the western world. The protagonist, Justin Quayle, undertakes a journey across Africa, Canada, and Europe, and finally determines his wife's death was related to the pharmaceutical companies' efforts to cover up the fact that their AIDS wonder drug had previously unidentified side effects. After wading through background information concerning Tessa's relationships with the various Kenyan communities and seemingly unconnected events including the illness, death, and disappearance of a local native woman who shared a hospital ward with our heroine, it becomes apparent that the epicenter of the plot concerns a large international pharmaceutical conglomerate, AIDS, and the clinical trials of a newly manufactured drug. The Constant Gardener, based mostly in Kenya, concerns the brutal murders of the wife (Tessa) of a British diplomat (Justin Quayle) and a local Kenyan physician.
Le Carre's novels have been evolving from the classic The Spy Who Came In From The Cold Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy The Honorable School Boy and Smiley's People to more current events in books such as the Little Drummer Girl, The Russia House, and Single and Single. True, with the demise of the cold war, Mr. Le Carre writing about international, intergovernmental espionage, his newest novel, The Constant Gardener, concerns the exact issues of public trust in clinical research that I have addressed previously in these pages.
I recently read a book by one of my favorite spy and mystery novel authors, John Le Carre. These issues have been well chronicled both in professional and lay publications. In past columns, I have commented on the challenges we in the health care industry face in regards to public trust, both in medical education as well as in biomedical research.
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