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Title: Interesting premise, but boring book
Review: A medical researcher finds a potential cure for an inevitably fatal disease that kills young people in the prime of their lives. Does he go through the proper experimental channels, thereby dooming several young people under his care, or does he ignore those channels, thereby possibly saving several lives? Hardly a new ethical problem, as I'm sure more than one researcher - AIDS researchers, for example - have faced this problem. In the book at hand, the author treats the problem novelistically, but his writer's skills are not up to the task. The characters are uninteresting, what one writer once called "ideas with legs". It's a long book, over 400 pages, and I gave up after 200. The idea merits the attention of a talented short-story writer and this writer is reputed to be just that. But as a novel, it's a failure.
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