A.M. James Shapiro first started experimenting with islet transplantation as a medical student at the University of Newcastle upon Thames. After multiple failures with mice and rats, he says his now famous Edmonton protocol was "really a last-ditch attempt" to make a good idea work in practice. Now director of the University of Alberta's Clinical Islet Transplant Program, Shapiro writes on page 43 about the "current state of the art of islet transplantation," for which a "combination of hurdles" remains.
Fran Hawthorne, author of Merck Druggernaut (Wiley, 2003) has been covering healthcare and finance for more than 20 years for publications including the New York Times, Newsday, Fortune, and Business Week. On page 26, she tells the story of how Merck slipped from being "the gold standard" to "a synonym for the worst in the industry." Since the publication of her book three years ago, she says "things got even ...
