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Bruce Nussbaum, 'Good Intentions; How big business and the medical establishment are corrupting the fight against AIDS' Atlantic Monthly Press USA 1990, 352 pages, ISBN 0-87113-385-7.
Good Intentionsis a tale of vaulting ambition, greed, and hubris set against the tragic backdrop of the world's number-one health crisis: AIDS.
Bruce Nussbaum takes us behind the scenes to reveal how America's top scientists are at the center of a triangle of power. He shows how the National Institute of Health allied with the drug company Burroughs Wellcome, secretly helped by the FDA, to steamroll a thirty-year-old drug, AZT, into becoming the only approved treatment for AIDS.
At the heart of the story is a small group of scientists that hold the lives of tens of thousands in their hands. There's the puppet master, the brilliant Dr. David Barry, Burroughs Wellcome's chief strategist; Dr. Tony Fauci, who grabbed control of the government's AIDS research program only to squander $1 billion without developing a single new drug; and Michael Callen, who fought for his life by battling the research labyrinth with a new biomedical underground.
An old-boy network of powerful medical researchers dominates in every disease field, from AIDS to Alzheimer's, Nussbaum reports. They control the major committees, they run the most important trials. They are accountable to no one. Despite the billions of taxpayers' dollars that go to them every year, there is no public oversight. Medical scientists have convinced society that only they can police themselves.
Business Week senior writer Bruce Nussbaum follows the money trial from the billions appropriated by Congress through a network of government laboratories and into the profit statements of Burroughs Wellcome. This is an inside look at how politics, science, and big business are bungling the fight against AIDS.
An award-winning writer, Bruce Nussbaum served in the Peace Corps from 1967 to 1969. Currently senior writer at Business Week, he is also the author of The World After Oil: The Shifting Axis of Power and Wealth. Mr. Nussbaum is married and lives in New York City.