Brad's lawyer plans to claim in defense that Brad has a gene for recklessness and instructs him to engage in various high-risk activities. Watson's price for providing a defense lawyer is that Brad must contaminate BioGen's cultures. After Brad's carelessness nearly allows one of Watson's sabotage attempts to succeed, the company takes advantage of Brad's attraction to teenage girls, and engineers his being accused and convicted of raping a minor. As part of his terms for financing BioGen, Watson previously forced the company to accept his irresponsible nephew Brad Gordon as its security chief. Ruthless venture capitalist 'Jack' Watson conspires to steal or sabotage BioGen's cultures of Frank's cells.

Frank's lawyers advise that the university, as a tax-funded organization, can still claim the rights to the cells under the doctrine of eminent domain. As the book opens Frank is suing the university for unauthorized misuse of his cells, but the trial judge rules that the cells were 'waste' and that the university could dispose of them as it wished. He later learned the checkups were a pretext for researching the genetic basis of his unusually successful response to treatment, and the physician's university had sold the rights to Frank's cells to BioGen, a biotechnology startup company. 'This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren't.' įrank Burnet has contracted an aggressive form of leukemia, and undergoes intensive treatment and four years of semiannual checkups. It was the fifteenth novel under his own name and his twenty-fifth overall, and the last to be published during his lifetime.Ī number of characters, including transgenic animals, try to survive in a world dominated by genetic research, corporate greed, and legal interventions. Next is a 2006 satirical techno-thriller by American writer Michael Crichton.

Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton