Robin Cook: Seizure (2004)

From the Publisher:
The New York Times bestseller is now in paperback. Power, religion, and bioscience collide in the new novel from the master of the medical thriller.

Robin Cook: Seizure. Berkley Publishing Group; ISBN: 0425197948 (October, 2004), 448 p., $7.99.

Robin Cook: Seizure (2003)

From the Publisher:
Senator Ashley Butler is a quintessential Southern demagogue whose support of traditional American values includes a knee-jerk reaction against virtually all biotechnologies. When he's called to chair a subcommittee introducing legislation to ban new cloning technology, the senator views his political future in bold relief; and Dr. Daniel Lowell, inventor of the technique that will take stem cell research to the next level, sees a roadblock positioned before his biotech startup.

The two seemingly opposite personalities clash during the senate hearings, but the men have a common desire. Butler's hunger for political power far outstrips his concern for the unborn; and Lowell's pursuit of gargantuan personal wealth and celebrity overrides any considerations for patients' well-being. Further complicating the proceedings is the confidential news that Senator Butler has developed Parkinson's disease-leading the senator and the researcher into a Faustian pact. In a perilous attempt to prematurely harness Lowell's new technology, the therapy leaves the senator with the horrifying effects of temporal lobe epilepsy-seizures of the most bizarre order.

Torn from the headlines, Seizure is a cautionary tale for a time where biotechnology pulls us into a promising yet frightening new world

Robin Cook: Seizure. Putnam; ISBN: 0399148760 (July, 2003), 464 p., $24.95