Seizure
Robin Cook

Senator Ashley Butler is a quintessential southern demagogue, whose support of traditional American values includes a knee jerk reaction against virtually all biotechnologies remotely associated with human reproduction. As the chairman of a subcommittee on health policy, he introduces legislation to ban a new cloning procedure that would take stem cell research to the next level. Dr. Daniel Lowell, the inventor of the technique, sees the proposed ban as a blow to his biotech startup and to people poised to benefit from its promised therapies.
The two formidable egos clash during the Senate hearing, but the men have a common desire. Butler's hunger for political power far outstrips his purported concern for the unborn, while Lowell's craving for personal wealth and celebrity overrides ethical considerations for patients' well being. Further complicating the situation is the confidential news that Senator Butler has developed a progressive form of Parkinson's disease, which threatens his political future and leads the Senator and the researcher into a Faustian pact. After a perilous attempt to prematurely harness Lowell's new technology, the Senator is left with the horrifying effects of temporal lobe epilepsy - seizures of the most bizarre order.

While the novel itself was well written and realistic in terms of the characters and the medical possibilities presented, it was also a bit on the disappointing side of things. The blurb above is from the cover of the novel, which is supposed to give the reader an idea of what the book is about. However, the part with the Senator's treatment going wrong only occurs in the last few chapters and then the novel ends rather abruptly.

Instead of this book being about biotechnology gone wrong, it's actually about the researcher spending time getting ready to "help" the Senator. Because of United States laws, this takes place in the Bahamas with a fertility and stem cell lab that has absolutely no ethics in place. The vast majority of this novel is about the researcher's lack of moral struggle when dealing with a place that has no ethics of its own. This, makes the novel rather dry and a bit on the boring side.

When the time finally does come for the process to turn wrong and for the Senator to get the seizures, we're already into the end of the novel. Just as things get interesting, it ends abruptly and leaves the reader wishing that the side effects of the treatment were what the novel was about.

My rating: Three out of five snails.