White Coat Black Hat: adventures on the dark side of medicine.

Carl Elliott

Boston: Beacon, 2010.

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Reading Carl Elliott's disarming expos[C] of the effects of big pharmaceuticals on medical practice in America, I initially could not avoid thinking of Bernie Madoff, the epitome of deception and greed who came to characterize an era of financial excess and deregulation. Certainly, some of the characters described in the book could have called Madoff an inspiration. And the documentation in this book of ethical abuses in clinical trials research--including at the University of Minnesota, Elliott's employer--brought immediate associations with John le Carre's novel The Constant Gardner (2001), in which western pharmaceutical companies with the complicity of their governments exploitatively recruited Nairobi slum dwellers as trial subjects for commercial and national gains.

But there is something else in this complex history that made me …