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

by Geeta Anand

Book Overview

The book that inspired the movie, Extraordinary Measures, starring Harrison Ford, Brendan Fraser, and Keri Russell, The Cure by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Geeta Anand is the remarkable true story of one father's determination to find a cure for his terminally sick children even if it meant he had to build a business from scratch to do so.

With three beautiful children, a new house, and financial security, John...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 006073440X
• ISBN13: 9780060734404
• Release Date: December 2009
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.9" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Just a great read

As a father of small children and a businessman I really enjoyed this book on multiple levels. Very well written. I could not put it down. Watch out, it made me cry several times.

A book about love

Ms. Anand tells a wonderful tale of true love. Love of a husband and wife faced with unexpected challenges so early in their marriage, and how they struggled to keep that love alive under both sad and horrific conditions. Love of children for their parents and each other. Love of family, both immediate and extended. And love for each and every person touched by the fight for the cure. I was swept away by the human drama and just when I thought I knew what was going to happen next, the story look another unforeseen turn. It's amazing to realize that this is a true story. Life and love doesn't get any better than this.

It makes you think and it makes you care

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.

Excellent Book About an Inspiring Family Story

As a father myself, I was incredibly moved by this book. It's an inspiring story about the things parents will do for their children. The writing is effortless, vivid and sensitive - you go through the Crowley's ups and downs with them from chapter to chapter, and you cannot stop until you have finished the entire book. I never thought reading about biotech firms could be this enoyable either - the author does an excellent job of taking you into world of biotech and venture capital and making it at once interesting, informative and easy to understand. This is simply a great book about a family's incredible, heart-wrenching story. A must read for all, especially for parents (and would be entrepreneurs).

A great story of where business and family collide

Kudos to this story of John Crowley's unbelievably ambitious, frequently frustrated and sometimes ethically reckless effort to find a cure for the fatal disease that afflicts two of his children. This book's perfect pacing and lean, utilitarian prose treats a tale that could have been as saccharine as a Lifetime movie as an unremittingly suspenseful thriller as Crowley has to balance his fiduciary responsibilities as the head of a biotechnology firm with his pressing need to get his children into a clinical drug trial before they die. It's a predicament that makes Sophie's Choice seem like a simple dilemma to resolve, but the author effortlessly weaves the complex world of biotechnology research and venture capital into a family story that any parent could identify with. It reminds me of David Simon's Homicide or Jon Harr's Civil Action. Crowley may now be a rich man, but it's uplifting to read about a CEO driven to succeed -- even if it means bending the rules -- by motives far more moral than the soul-sucking avarice that dominates Wall Street today.