Spirals

An intriguing but highly uneven bio-medico-horror thriller--starting strong with DNA-research scares, then drifting into poorly paced flashbacks, and winding up in hysterical, murky mad-scientist melodrama. Peter McKusick, M.D. and Ph.D., is doing interferon research at the half-academic/half-commercial research lab on the Harvard U. campus circa 1980; he lives with three-year-old daughter Kitty--apparently the offspring of McKusick's affair with anthropologist Kathleen, who was killed in an accident when they were both doing research in Colombia. (Kitty resembles Kathleen in amazing detail.) And when Kitty starts to become mysteriously ill, the local anti-Harvard forces (who have always protested about the dangers of DNA research) claim that she has picked up a nasty bug in her father's lab. [excerpted from [Kirkus Review][1]] William Patrick began his career at Little, Brown, then moved to Harvard University Press, where he acquired and edited works by the likes of Edward O. Wilson and Jane Goodall. While working at Harvard he wrote Spirals (Houghton), a novel set in Cambridge during the early days of cloning and recombinant DNA research. [Wikipedia] This is Edward O. Wilson's re