title: The Cell Game: Sam Waksal's Fast Money and False Promises--and the Fate of ImClone's Cancer Drug
author:  Alex Prud'homme 
description: Since the ImClone scandal first broke, most of the media's attention has focused on CEO Sam Waksal's insider trading and the charges filed against Martha Stewart, a close friend and investor in the pharmaceutical company. Prud'homme, who first reported on ImClone for Vanity Fair, reminds readers of the bigger story, the one that set the financial hijinx in motion: ImClone's failed attempt to bring a potentially groundbreaking cancer medication, Erbitux, to market. This story tells of scientists like John Mendelsohn, who led the research into C225, the antibody at the heart of Erbitux, and patients like Shannon Kellum, a 28-year-old woman diagnosed with colon cancer for whom the medication was a "miracle drug" that added a few years to her life. She was one of the rare lucky ones; Prud'homme's reporting is especially strong when he delves into the seemingly haphazard way in which ImClone distributed C225 for "compassionate use" during the clinical testing period. The FDA's rejection of ImClone's "scientifically incomplete" test data was the immediate motivation for Waksal's crimes, but Prud'homme's portrayal suggests it was completely in character for the reckless social-climbing executive, described by acquaintances as a "pathological liar" who cared more about making money than about curing cancer. Prud'homme ends his compelling account with Waksal's sentencing, and even though he'll inevitably have to update the paperback to wrap up coverage of the Martha Stewart trial, it's well worth reading the book now to appreciate what's really at stake in ImClone's downfall. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: Robin Cook
   Fatal Cure(1993)
    
   ____________________________________________________________
   PROLOGUE
    
   February seventeenth was a fateful day for Sam Flemming.
   Sam considered himself an extremely lucky person. As a broker far one of the major Wall Street firms,
  he’d become wealthy by the age of forty-six. Then, like a gambler who knew when to quit, Sam had
  taken his earnings and fled north from the concrete canyons of New York to idyllic Bartlet, Vermont.
  There he’d begun to do what he’d always wanted to do: paint.
   Part of Sam’s good fortune had always been his health, yet at half past four on February seventeenth,
  something strange began to happen. Numerous water molecules within many of his cells began to split
  apart into two fragments: a relatively inoffensive hydrogen atom and a highly reactive, viciously
  destructive hydroxyl free radical.
   As these molecular events transpired, Sam’s cellular defenses were activated. But on this particular day
  those defenses against free rad