POLITICAL BOOKNOTES

...If, if, if," Teitelman writes...

...Sugar Corporation was indicted in 1942 for its harsh treatment of its American black employees...

...Meanwhile, the companies, now up and running, needed huge infusions of new capital to cover what in many cases had become alarming "burn rates"—the amount of money consumed by start-ups before they're self-sustaining...

...Perhaps as penance for this affront to the heartland, The New Yorker has in recent years run quite a few pieces on agriculture...

...Many of them couldn't shed their academic prudery fast enough...

...Dick's first wife, Blitz, who smoked Viceroys—a non-RJR brand that she surreptitiously stored in a Winston pack around the family— died of colon cancer at 52...

...Foil, which later became Reynolds Aluminum...

...With his prodigal son, R.S., who had quit RJR to return home to Bristol, Abram helped create U.S...

...It was the talk of miracles that led it to biotech in the first place...

...Later, Hardin's two sons—Abram and R.J.—would follow in their father's entrepreneurial footsteps...

...Privilege quashed the murder investigation, which remains unsolved and is still the subject of much quiet family speculation today...

...or look for a buyer...

...Abram—a staunch Christian and the only known teetotaler in the Reynolds family—did give up his tobacco business shortly after the turn of the century...

...It reflected the heat and light of the great entrepreneurial revolution just before it, in electronics...

...Committees are formed and memos are circulated, but no one grasps the seriousness of the baby deaths...

...Drugs...

...This fall was not atypical...

...The implications were vast, especially against cancer, where the problem with most drugs is that they kill not only tumor cells, but vital tissue as well...

...Harold Ross, founding editor of The New Yorker, once remarked that his magazine was not for the little old lady from Dubuque...

...Peter Elkind presents this story as a first-rate murder mystery, with such characters as an egomaniacal hospital administrator who once entered a meeting to the musical theme from Star Wars, a 300-pound snuff-dipping judge, and a Mickey Spillane gumshoe who calls pretty girls "dollies" and bad guys "scumbags...

...Brother Abram set sights on Bristol, Tennessee...

...wrote about corn, potatoes, wheat, rice, and soybeans...

...With a cancer cure too far off and too costly, Genetic Systems switched to a short-term strategy of fighting sexually transmitted diseases like herpes...

...By 1985, the year Eli Lilly began selling the first genetically engineered human therapeutic, Genentech's human insulin, Genetic Systems was on the block...

...Patrick Reynolds, Tom Shachtman...

...Sister Nancy, also a lifetime smoker, died of emphysema after Dick...

...Gene Dreams is built around the story of one company, Seattle-based Genetic Systems...

...Like many biotech firms, Genetic Systems was more a result of money pursuing science than the other way around...

...Instead, it simply attributed these deaths to organizational "growing pains," poor staff morale, and lack of effective leadership...

...So the conventional wisdom went, and so it was to be...

...quotas and tariffs on sugar (discussed in a paltry one and a half of Big Sugar's 264 pages) should be abolished...

...But even more than miracles, as Teitelman notes, Wall Street thrives today on takeovers...

...As Teitelman writes, "Even if nothing happens, takeover talk is good for business...

...The Washington Post's underappreciated Ward Sinclair, one of the best agrijournalists, recently left to become an organic farmer...

...But what is more chilling is the failure of a San Antonio public hospital and medical school to account for such heinous criminal activity...

...It didn't matter what a company could do, but what it could imply...

...Ironically, Dick Reynolds, the eldest child of R.J...

...More attention came to focus on ways not of making money, but of raising money...

...Never in all the grand speculation about biotech overtaking the medical market had there been more than passing attention paid to the necessity of fielding huge expense-accountdriven sales forces, making inroads into the highly conservative world of hospital purchasing, or any of the other enormously expensive tasks involve in turning products into money...

...At best it would be a small satellite of questionable value in someone else's organization...

...Playing the game required cash...

...VD (the reasoning went) was only temporary, to fund the work in cancer...

...Medical Center Hospital, relatively new, ambitious, and deeply concerned about its image, was desperate to attract paying patients to offset the costs of the charity cases the hospital was ostensibly created to accept...

...In fewer than five years, Genetic Systems went from being a selfstyled firebrand in two concurrent revolutions—cancer therapy and the overthrow of the big drug companies— to a small, chronically stretched underachiever whose main product was a quick test for an annoying, though hardly life-threatening, venereal disease...

...When it came down to it, most biotech companies simply couldn't afford to compete...

...They are the largest group of foreign workers regularly admitted to the U.S...

...In a series of stories that appeared in the mid-1980s, E.J...

...Reynolds Family and Fortune...

...So much for idealism...

...The magazine deserves praise for this...

...One of those investors was a 28year-old stockbroker and part-time musician named David Blech...

...It's insane for the U.S...

...Unfortunately, The New Yorker has approached the subject in its characteristically literalminded fashion, crop by crop...

...When babies began to die mysteriously, her hours on duty became known around the hospital as "the Death Shift...

...There is an economic price to pay when medical establishments get bad press or face litigation for malpractice or criminal conduct...

...Its meaning to Bristol was slightly less clear...

...The bottom line, then, became money, not health care or justice...

...Now Alec Wilkinson has taken on sugar...

...It was hardly the sort of inspired goal most investors were looking for in a low-performing risk stock...

...fold...

...If the company had to license its patents on other monoclonals, it was only to make enough money to give the diagnostics a chance of success...

...It was jazzy...

...Little, Brown...

...The Camel-smoking, former jet-setter died very wealthy, but left nothing to his estranged sons who already had "small" trust funds of $2.5 million each, thanks to their grandmother, Katherine...

...Elkind's book reveals that while our society is able to bring a nurse who commits a crime to justice, it still has far to go in its ability to pin responsibility on a medical establishment that omits its duty to serve the public...

...Timothy Noah...

...It's diabolical enough that Nurse Genene Jones murdered as many as 16 babies in the early 1980s...

...Henry G. Brinton Gene Dreams...

...Scores of investors suddenly dropped everything in search of talented researchers with interesting ideas...

...With his brother Isaac, Blech contacted a cancer researcher named Robert Nowinski who had reported curing leukemia in mice by pumping them full of monoclonals...

...Clearly, however, a combination of factors—low pay, brutally long hours, authoritarian work rules, and yes, physical hazards, chief among them being cut by a knife or piercing an eye or an eardrum on a sharp cane leaf—makes cutting sugarcane a lousy job...

...Growers started importing West Indians to cut sugar only after the U.S...

...Junior's lungs required the pure item...

...Information like this makes Big Sugar intermittently gripping, but overall, Wilkinson's book is difficult to get through...

...Robert Teitelman...

...A traditional English confession of sin states "we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done," attaching equal seriousness to sins of omission and commission...

...That's an exaggeration...

...Hardin convinced his father that, rather than sell raw leaf to the manufacturers, they could make and sell their own sweet twist of chewing tobacco at a much bigger profit...

...R.J.—a heavy drinker and notorious philanderer in his youth—finally settled down in his fifties and married his cousin Katherine, then in her early twenties...

...As Teitelman points out, they "began to think of Wall Street not as a grim Golgotha, but as a Golconda...a legendary city 'where everyone who passes through got rich.'" It should be no surprise that the industry soon became infatuated with Wall Street's rapturous murmurings, relegating all its other high-minded goals behind the development of the most marketable, toweringly profitable products it could think of—human pharmaceuticals...

...The four children who followed in quick succession— Dick, Mary...

...Somehow, personal responsibility is choked by the bureaucratic tangle of hospital administration...

...Specifically, Wilkinson writes about the West Indians, most of them Jamaican, who come each winter to south Florida to perform what Wilkinson calls "the most perilous work in America...

...Patrick Reynolds' slice of personal geneology, biopsied and found malignant in this book, is nevertheless delivered at times with the nostalgic softness of eulogy...

...It's important to note that the story didn't turn out the same way for the other branch of the Reynolds family...

...As is often the case with New Yorker journalism (even, alas, in the post-Shawn era), Wilkinson seems less concerned with framing an argument or narrative than with creating a little democracy of facts where the number of buzzards the author sees flying over a canefield one day is as important as the revelation that the Labor Department official responsible for the welfare of the foreign workers has never challenged a single firing...

...I'm convinced this is true, but after reading Wilkinson's lengthy explanation I still haven't a clue about how the con actually works...

...By the following June, the Blechs had each parlayed an initial investment of $60,000, their association with Nowinski, and some quick positioning as a leader in developing monoclonalbased cancer therapies into a paper profit of $14 million...

...As a result, sugarcane growers end up importing 10,000 cutters annually to do the job...

...government to prop up an enterprise that not only depends so heavily on the exploitation of foreign workers but also helps impoverish countries like Jamaica that might otherwise develop thriving sugar industries of their own...

...Although Wilkinson worked several years on this book, he doesn't seem to have thought very hard about what his mountain of facts means...

...Scared of lawsuits and negative publicity, the medical establishment did nothing to bring suspicious deaths to the attention of lawenforcement officials...

...His anger toward his father never quite breaks to the surface in the narrative, though just cause is painfully detailed...

...Powerful self-justifications were required to compromise on so many fronts in such a short period of time, and Genetic Systems undertook them with a vengeance...

...To bring in revenue, the company signed licensing deals with several big drug companies, which satisfied its short-term needs for cash, but ensured that when it finally had a product to sell, most of the income would go to its partners...

...Reading around, Blech discovered the as-yet-uncommercialized field of monoclonal antibodies, a class of highly specific cell killers that can be bred selectively in laboratory mice...

...Unlike Kahn's pieces, Wilkinson's focus is on the labor conditions of agricultural workers...

...Imagine Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider getting married at the end of Last Tango in Paris, settling in and trying to make it work, and you get some idea of the outcome...

...One by one, the realities of living with Wall Street took over...

...Nurse Jones was removed during a staff reorganization, and ushered off to further employment (and further murder) with a recommendation...

...Alec Wilkinson...

...These guest workers make good employees mainly because they are desperate to earn cash to take back to the Third World, and because they know if they get out of line—for example, by threatening to strike—they risk immediate deportation...

...That's the one place I disagree...

...decided to build his own tobacco factory to the south, in the small North Carolina town of Winston, near Salem...

...Even the poorest American citizens spurn the work...

...With each if, the odds mounted...

...Wall Street's well-publicized dissatisfaction with biotech, and the industry's subsequent squandering of its future vision in a blizzard of compromises and short-term deal making, is a perfect paradigm for the sort of self-destructive plunder on which the bull market of the eighties so far has fed successfully...

...For this hospital, like many medical establishments, the cost of carefully monitoring its employees, risking public investigation, and protecting its economically disadvantaged patients was simply too high a price to pay...

...The agricultural economy is one of America's great neglected stories, and the handful of writers who cover this unglamorous subject often do important work for which they receive inadequate recognition...

...It was one thing to have a new technology, which, after all, is all that biotech is...

...The leap of faith here, propelled in large part by the talismanic attachment to cancer, was prodigious even by Wall Street's fickle standards...

...For example, the first public offering of another biotech company, Genentech, in October 1980 was so mindboggling50 minutes after the first one million units hit the market at $35, they were trading for a record $89 a share—that it set off a latterday gold rush...

...Takeovers provide a jump start for the market on cold winter days...

...Cancer had the intellectual rigor of Susan Sontag and her Illness as Metaphor," Teitelman writes, "herpes, the breathless sensationalism of the local news, Dear Abby, Cosmopolitan, and the Playboy Philosopher...

...Everywhere biotech firms that a few years earlier had been trumpeting wonder drugs, were now trying to impress investors with how aggressively they sued each other over patents with no proven commercial value...

...Seldom has Wall Street been so dreamily, so willingly seduced as it was by these biojocks, who, with their cockiness and their flare for futuristic letterheads (Genentech, Biogen, Hybritech, Cetus) arrived on the scene seeming to know all the right moves...

...Desperate, the firm ultimately abandoned its drug program in favor of manufacturing diagnostic kits, which are cheaper to design and take much less time to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration...

...Senior's brother, Abram, was worried about the "sinfulness" of tobacco and said that if the Lord wanted him to quit manufacturing "chew," he would find a way...

...Wall Street lives on talk...

...Kahn Jr...

...The changes were not really changes, but instruments for leveraging success...

...Of course the seduction was mutual...

...But Reynolds finally begs the toughest question: "Who is to be held accountable for the 10 million Americans who have died prematurely from smoking...

...It roared out of the laboratory at a time when America's industrial selfimage was in shards...

...In fact, Wilkinson writes, most West Indians never held a cane knife before they arrived in Florida...

...It literally exploded in his brain," his son Patrick writes...

...apparently coercion has always been a crucial element to success in south Florida sugarcane farming...

...It was another to lock elbows with the major drug companies in a brawl over market shares...

...And it made promises...

...Barry Werth The Gilded Leaf: Triumph, Tragedy, and Tobacco, Three Generations of the R.J...

...When investors discovered only belatedly that drug development is a highly risky venture, taking a huge up-front commitment of cash—about $150 million—and time-10 years or more—their lust for biotech issues froze...

...Diagnostics were only a stop-gap, until the company had therapeutics to show...

...The one doctor who has deep suspicions about Genene Jones is eased out of his position as medical director...

...He suffered from chronic emphysema...

...To watch a West Indian wield a cane knife is to see a centuries-old art," proclaims the narrator of an . idiotic public-relations movie made by the Florida Cane League...

...So they were left with three choices: license their discoveries to the big drug companies, which were capable of marketing them but would also seize the lion's share of their profits...

...A drunken party at the family mansion in Winston left 20-year-old Z. Smith dead with a gunshot wound in the head...

...In fact, in the last sentence of the book, when he uses the word "unwittingly" to refer to the damage inflicted by the product his elders made so famous, Patrick Reynolds undercuts the impact of his entire work...

...By the turn of the century, R.J.'s deals with the Dukes of Durham had led him into manufacturing cigarettes as well as his "chew...

...The book is especially bad at explaining precisely how the cutters get paid...

...San Antonio's Medical Center Hospital is, after all, an institution that employs not only an executive director, but a senior associate executive director, three associate executive directors, an executive assistant to the executive director, and several administrators...

...But a hospital committee investigation failed to uncover proof of wrongdoing and recommended "judicious silence on the issue...

...This is what Wall Street had neglected in its earlier enthusiasm...

...Here's my suggestion: U.S...

...Nancy and Z. Smith—would all inherit vast sums, only to be plagued to various degrees by the dissipation born of an embarrassment of riches and the early loss of both parents' discipline and counsel...

...Oilspilleating bacteria, toxic-waste devourers, leaner hogs, supercorn, miracle cures...

...That it should have happened with such a young industry, so filled with promise, makes biotech's dissolution all the more troubling...

...Stocks trade hands, brokers start racking up commissions, investment bankers start selling deals again, financial printers start putting in overtime, and journalists sniff around for new trends...

...Father Dick abandoned his first and second wives and the six sons from the two marriages in short order, echoing the flight of his own mother, Katherine, who remarried and abandoned Dick and his siblings to the care of servants after the demise of the elder R. J. (The marketing genius behind Prince Albert and Camels died of pancreatic cancer, having preferred to chew his tobacco...

...What the buyout meant to Genetic Systems was that it no longer had any hope of becoming what it had promised: an independent drug company specializing in revolutionary cancer treatments...

...Teitelman speculates it bought the start-up mainly to ensure that no one else would—a hedge...

...Dick's second wife, Marianne, the mother of Patrick, died of a heart ailment aggravated by smoking...

...The researchers were dazzled by Wall Street's overheated advances...

...The company, Genetic Systems, had no revenues, no profits, and no products, and, though Wall Street had blithely consented not to ask about any of this, or precisely how the company planned to make money once it had something to sell, anyone paying attention knew it would be at least a decade before the firms would have a marketable cancer drug—if ever...

...Naturally this led to a pyramiding of financing schemes, and, more importantly, a series of deals and compromises that, as Teitelman correctly points out, forced Genetic Systems to sacrifice virtually all its early goals just to stay in business...

...Reynolds, died in 1964 from directly inhaling too much oxygen...

...judging from Wilkinson's description, cutting sugarcane in Florida doesn't sound as dangerous as, say, mining coal in Pennsylvania...

...It was not until Jones moved to a clinic in a small town, and began to kill again, that several local doctors blew the whistle and had the nurse arrested...

...Harper and ROW, $18.95...

...At the center of the mystery is Genene Jones, a bizarre, complex woman who lavished affection on infants as she injected them with a variety of lethal drugs...

...Oh, what promises...

...As early as the 1870s, R.J...

...He had been living as a recluse with his fourth wife in Switzerland, rarely able to go anywhere for the last decade of his life without his oxygen cannister...

...Unsurprisingly, its answer came from Wall Street...

...Teitelman believes it's ironic that the big winner in all this was Wall Street, as "the scent of takeovers began to bring investors back to biotechnology...

...It was eventually sold to Bristol Meyers for $294 million, not as much as some other companies fetched but still a bonanza, given its problems...

...Patrick explains the humble beginnings of the dynasty, taking us back to pre-Civil War Virginia where Hardin Reynolds, a poor, young farmer burned twice by price gougers, vowed never again to be at the mercy of tobacco buyers...

...if ever an industry was made to titillate Wall Street's "promiscuous imagination" (Teitelman's smart phrase, and one of many in this lively, sharply-drawn book), biotechnology was it...

...Knopf, $18.95...

...Leverage...

...Mary Reynolds, a heavy user of the family product, died of abdominal cancer one month before her 45th birthday...

...Wall Street's way to profit from biotech's failure isn't ironic, but absolutely predictable, given its current taste for scavenging...

...The reader is left to muse between the lines at whether 40-year-old Patrick, the Hollywood actor turned vocal arch-enemy of smoking, has really grasped the full impact and ethical dilemma of his tarred legacy...

...Georgann Eubanks Big Sugar: Seasons in the Canefields of Florida...

...He makes a back-bending effort at balanced treatment, discussing at length the legion of philanthropic foundations created in the Reynolds name...

...the administration prefers to see the problem as one of personality conflict and "solves" it by recommending the removal of both Jones's critics and defenders...

...Miracles are iffy, but with buyout rumors, it doesn't matter whether they happen or not...

...Wilkinson says the system is deliberately complicated in order to confuse outsiders and allow growers to falsify the number of hours cutters work...

...But the real problems of this public hospital and its partner medical school run deeper than bureaucratic tangles...

...And as the industry shifted its gaze from cancer to lesser diseases, it also turned from research to paper wars...

...Boredom, recriminations, verbal cruelty, abandonment—not a pretty sight...