As this is written, jurors are being selected for lifestyle-marketing entrepreneur Martha Stewart's trial on charges of insider trading of her shares in the small drug-development company ImClone. Stewart was a friend to ImClone CEO Sam Waksal, and he is already in prison for doing as she allegedly did on a much larger scale. As large as that scale was, Waksal's ill-gotten gains didn't begin to match his personal indebtedness. He loved living large, knowing the stars, and being part of the in crowd. The son of Holocaust survivors, a medical researcher who shifted from the lab to a front office, and charming as the day is long, Waksal had waited long enough to cash in when, in the mid-1990s, he seized on a promising cancer drug as ImClone's and his winning ticket. He cut a deal with pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb to produce the substance and launched the tests necessary to get the drug FDA approval. But he was living so high that he felt compelled to cut corners and rush the payoff. When the FDA balked--as it should have--his personal house of cards collapsed. The drug and ImClone didn't fall with him, which is fortunate mostly because, as Prud'homme shows in the most interesting pages of his long, exemplarily written report, the stuff remains very promising as a specific (treatment) against tumors.

Ray Olson — Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved