A Simple Cure, by Lawrence Gold

"A Simple Cure" engages the reader in the search for the cure of malignant melanoma. While an uncommon skin cancer, one American dies of melanoma almost every hour (every 61 minutes). The incidence rate has tripled in the last twenty years.

When nature, in her ultimate act of irony, strikes Richard Powell, a cancer specialist, with malignant melanoma, a highly aggressive form of cancer, his wife, Terri devotes her life to curing the disease that ultimately kills her husband.

While research laboratories are characterized as noble in search of cures, and proprietary drug companies are caricatured as ruthless and materialistic, too often, the distinctions aren’t so clear.

The murder of a drug courier to obtain an experimental and promising treatment for malignant melanoma, unleashes a chain of devastating consequences.

People for Alternative Treatment, a company created to find cures for rare diseases, had fallen on hard times and become a subsidiary of Kendall Pharmaceuticals, a company with very different values.

Experimentation with a vaccine against tuberculosis is showing surprising effects in controlling malignant melanoma at PAT and UC Medical Center. Kendall is enthralled with the economic potential of such a treatment, while researchers are leery and have many unanswered questions.

Kendall’s determination to push the vaccine into clinical trial at all costs is in conflict with Terri and her ethical associates.

When clinical trials begin, the vaccine’s effects are miraculous. Soon, however, once again, we see the rule of unintended consequences.

About the Author

I was born in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, moved to Queens, and then, as New Yorkers say, we ascended to the Island. After graduating from Valley Stream Central High School, I went to Adelphi, a college then, a university now, and then to medical school in Chicago. The war in Vietnam interrupted my postgraduate training with a year in Colorado Springs and another as a Battalion Surgeon in Vietnam. I spent seven months in the Central Highlands with the 4th Infantry and five months in an evacuation hospital in Long Binh outside Saigon where I ran the emergency room.

I returned intact in 1968 to complete my training in internal medicine and diseases of the kidney, nephrology. I worked for twenty-three years in Berkeley, California in a hospital-based practice caring for patients with complicated illnesses often in ICU and served as Chief of Medicine.

My wife Dorlis and I retired in October 1995 and sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge for a life at sea in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Four years later, exhausted from repairing everything on board, (often many times) we sold the sailboat and within a year took the lazy man's out; we bought a Nordic Tug, a trawler. We motored around Florida, the Bahamas, the entire East Coast and completed two 'Circle trips' to Canada and back, eight months, the first time, five months, the second.

I wrote professionally as a physician to inform but rarely to entertain, at least not on purpose. First, "Do No Harm" was published in April 2007. "No Cure for Murder" was released in August 2011. "For the Love of God" was published in January 2012 and "The Sixth Sense" in July 2012. In the last two years, I've written three screenplays based on my novels and hope to see one or more produced for the screen. I submitted my screenplay, "Rage" to the 80th Annual Writer's Digest contest and won honorable mention (57 out of 11,000).

We live in beautiful Grass Valley with 13 year old Mike, a terrier mix and Bennie, a 7 year old purebred though enormous Yorkie.

Follow the Author on Twitter

BUY THE BOOK ON AMAZON

###