"Yes."
"Did Dr. Gross ever tell you that you still had leukemia?"
"No."
"Did anyone in his office, or did any of his staff, ever tell you that?"
"No."
"Then," Rodriguez said, "if I understand your testimony, at no time did you have any specific information that you were still ill?"
"Correct."
"All right. Now let's turn to your treatment. You received surgery and chemotherapy. Do you know if you were given the standard treatment for T-cell leukemia?"
"No, my treatment was not standard."
"It was new?"
"Yes."
"Were you the first patient to receive this treatment protocol?"
"Yes. I was."
"Dr. Gross told you that?"
"Yes."
"And did he tell you how this new treatment protocol was developed?"
"He said it was part of a research program."
"And you agreed to participate in this research program?"
"Yes."
"Along with other patients with the disease?"
"I believe there were others, yes."
"And the research protocol worked in your case?"
"Yes."
"You were cured."
"Yes."
"Thank you. Now, Mr. Burnet, you are aware that in medical research, new drugs to help fight disease are often derived from, or tested on, patient tissues?"
"Yes."
"You knew your tissues would be used in that fashion?"
"Yes, but not for commercial - "
"I'm sorry, just answer yes or no. When you agreed to allow your tissues to be used for research, did you know they might be used to derive or test new drugs?"
"Yes."
"And if a new drug was found, did you expect the drug to be made available to other patients?"
"Yes."
"Did you sign an authorization for that to happen?"
A long pause. Then: "Yes."
"Thank you, Mr. Burnet. I have no further questions."
"How do you thinkit went?" her father asked as they left the courthouse. Closing arguments were the following day. They walked toward the parking lot in the hazy sunshine of downtown Los Angeles.
"Hard to say," Alex said. "They confused the facts very successfully. We know there's no new drug that emerged from this program, but I doubt the jury understands what really happened. We'll bring in more expert witnesses to explain that UCLA just made a cell line from your tissues and used it to manufacture a cytokine, the way it is manufactured naturally inside your body. There's no 'new drug' here, but that'll probably be lost on the jury. And there's also the fact that Rodriguez is explicitly shaping this case to look exactly like the Moore case, a couple of decades back. Moore was a case very much like yours. Tissues were taken under false pretenses and sold. UCLA won that one easily, though they shouldn't have."
"So, counselor, how does our case stand?"
She smiled at her father, threw her arm around his shoulder, and kissed him on the cheek.
"Truth? It's uphill," she said.
Chapter 3-5
CHapter 003
Barry Sindler,divorce lawyer to the stars, shifted in his chair. He was trying to pay attention to the client seated across the desk from him, but he was having trouble. The client was a nerd named Diehl who ran some biotech company. The guy talked abstractly, no emotion, practically no expression on his face, even though he was telling how his wife was screwing around on him. Diehl must have been a terrible husband. But Barry wasn't sure how much money there was in this case. It seemed the wife had all the money.
Diehl droned on. How his first suspicions arose when he called her from Las Vegas. How he discovered the charge slips for the hotel that she went to every Wednesday. How he waited in the lobby and caught her checking in with a local tennis pro. Same old California story. Barry had heard it a hundred times. Didn't these people know they were walking cliches? Outraged husband catches wife with the tennis pro. They wouldn't even use that one onDesperate Housewives.
Barry gave up trying to listen. He had too much on his mind this morning. He had lost the Kirkorivich case, and it was all over town. Just because DNA tests had shown that it wasn't the billionaire's baby. And then the court wouldn't award him his fees, even though he had cut them to a measly $1.4 mil. The judge gave him a quarter of that. Every damn lawyer in town was gloating, because they all had it in for Barry Sindler. He had heard thatL.A. Magazine was doing a big story on the case, sure to be unfavorable to Barry. Not that he gave a crap about that. The truth was, the more he got portrayed as an unprincipled, ruthless prick, the more clients flocked to him. Because when it came to a divorce, people wanted a ruthless prick. They lined up for one. And Barry Sindler was without a doubt the most ruthless, unscrupulous, publicity-hungry, self-aggrandizing, stop-at-nothing son-of-a-bitch divorce lawyer in Southern California. And proud of it!
No, Barry didn't worry about any of those things. He didn't even worry about the house he was building in Montana for Denise and her two rotten kids. He didn't worry about the renovations on their house in Holmby Hills, even though the kitchen alone was costing $500K, and Denise kept changing the plans. Denise was a serial renovator. It was a disease.
No, no, no. Barry Sindler worried about just one thing - the lease. He had one whole floor in an office building on Wilshire and Doheny, twenty-three attorneys in his office, none of them worth a shit, but seeing all of them at their desks impressed the clients. And they could do the minor stuff, like take depositions and file delaying motions - stuff Barry didn't want to be bothered with. Barry knew that litigation was a war of attrition, especially in custody cases. The goal was to run the costs as high as you could and stretch the proceedings out as long as you could, because that way Barry earned the largest possible fees, and the spouse eventually got tired of the endless delays, the new filings, and of course the spiraling costs. Even the richest of them eventually got tired.