The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million--And Bucked the Medical Establishment--In a Quest to Save His Children Review

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(More customer reviews)This wonderful book has a lot of emotional depth and complexity. John Crowley, the young father, is brash, brilliant, arrogant, and ignorant. He makes personal mistakes and business mistakes, yet you remain drawn to his story by empathy for his desperation as he fears that his small children will suffer a slow painful death. It's an honest and interesting portrait of a real human being, not a one-dimensional hero.
It's not really a business book and you don't need any familiarity with venture capital financing to understand the text, but John Crowley's business provides the book with a fascinating emotional contrast between his frantic urgency as a parent and the dispassionate PowerPoint analyses expected by his investors. They share a common goal, but the mindset is completely different.
It's not really a science book, but the drug development process adds to the story's drama. There's no Eureka! moment when all the problems are solved. Patients are desperate for anything they can get as soon as they can get it, but the science is ambiguous, the bizarre biotechnology manufacturing processes are difficult to operate, and then the clinical trial results are uncertain. An experimental compound might kill a young patient, or bring quick improvements that fade over time, or have different impacts on different patients. And even with these uncertain prospects there's strong competition among parents for the extremely limited number of places in trials.
One of the most appealing aspects of the book is the author's light touch. She never puts herself or her opinions into the story. The book ends with an Afterword relating events subsequent to the basic text, but the author doesn't seize pages to tell us what it all means. At the end I found myself wondering, "Well, what does it all mean?" I looked up Pompe disease information on the internet, wondered what people in the Pompe "community" thought about the book, and wanted to know how the science has progressed. The book makes you think and it makes you care.


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