Firestarter

The heading of this short piece refers to a Stephen King novel. Very annoyingly, I cannot find my copy of it at the moment - but I am 99% certain that this is the book which features university students voluntarily undergoing testing of a new drug 'Lot Six' (my brother, Malcolm, will correct me if I'm wrong). Of course, since it's a Stephen King story very strange and sinister things start happening during the testing. One cannot help but be reminded of King's story when one reads of the appalling events currently ongoing at the North London Hospital, where drug tests on 6 men seem to have gone drastically wrong. Even the very vocabulary is redolent of Stephen King territory, with the name of the drug being tested being 'TGN1412', the company conducting the testing being 'Paraxel', the makers of the drug being called 'TeGenero', and the drug itself apparently being what is known in the trade as, 'a humanised monoclonal antibody'. One shivers just at the description. One does more than shiver in hearing the placebo-taker describe what happened to his colleagues, "The test ward turned into a living hell minutes after we were injected....The men went down like dominoes. They began tearing their shirts off complaining of fever, then some screamed that their heads were going to explode. After that they started fainting, vomiting and writhing around in their beds." I wish I had the King book to hand, because my recollection is that a paragraph in almost exactly the same terms as above appears, when he describes his 'fictional' drug test. Life imitating art in a horrible way.