Check out this post for a fascinating and cool rundown of experiments on people in the US. Enjoy!

A woman off to the side noticed the shooter’s face. She saw that his eyes were absolutely huge.

“Hot bullets,” he said to no one in particular.

He stopped at a table and poured a Pepsi on the top of the gun, and on his hand. He stopped firing and watched a man behind the wheel of a car in the parking lot. The man’s hand slipped along the gearshift as he put it in reverse.

He was horrified, looking into the restaurant, but he was still a careful driver: He checked his mirrors before he backed up.

He was sure to call someone. They would come soon.

The shooter adjusted his grip on the gun. The woman watched his knuckles carefully. She saw them turn from white to red when he relaxed his hands. She saw them tense and go white again and held her breath.

It just went off, like, oops. The first shot hit solid and sent a guy cutting pizza for his son back into a wall.

“Wow,” the shooter said. “I’m sorry.”

He apologized in the same tone a mother uses when she tells her child the hamster died.

“What was that?” someone said. “What the hell?”

continued…

My first novel, Bad Day for the Home Team, is slated to be published Aug. 15. Here and on my tumblr site, http://alexomeara.tumblr.com/ I will post the first chapter of the book in installments. I will begin on Thursday, Aug. 12 and it will be fully posted Monday, Aug. 16.

I invite everyone to read, comment, raise your hands, stamp your feet, yell, scream and whatever as this unfolds. I hope you enjoy it.

This is a book that motivates action, causes me to rethink the basics of running, and is worth reading twice for the info.

The paperback of Chasing Medical Miracles is due out on May 25. There is a newly written foreword about swine flu and the clinical trials process for that. I will excerpt that foreword on this site this week and in the days leading up to the release of the paperback.

Also in August my first novel, Bad Day for the Home Team, will be released by Zumaya Books. The book is about how a very average man in Sierra Vista, Arizona walks into a pizza place, shoots and kills 30 people, then kills himself. He comes back as a ghost and tries to figure out why he did what he did while a cop, his brother, and a reporter try to also unravel the mystery of “Why he done it?”

Check this out: Video is discussion of impact of privacy rules on research from ACRO

A Ugandan health official said no trials were conducted at IDI. I was left wondering what was accurate: some trials, no trials, or lots of trials. What I was sure of was that Pfizer appeared to be a slippery operation when it came to trials . Recent articles have showed this to be true:

I will be speaking about clinical trials and signing copies of Chasing Medical Miracles at the Tucson Festival of Books next Saturday, March 13. The Festival, now only in its second year, is a fantastic event for anyone interested in books. More than 400 authors will speak, present, sign books, and be available to answer questions and talk. As I did last year I am presenting at the Festival with Dr. Allan Hamilton, author of the Scalpel and the Soul, an inspirational memoir about his experiences as a neurosurgeon.

The presentation is Medicine: the Miracle of Science and the Science of Miracles on Saturday at 1:00 pm – 02:00 pm in the Koffler Builindg on the University of Arizona Campus, room 204.

I look forward to meeting you there or at the signing afterward!

Whether the movie’s views about research and money are wholly accurate is beside the point. It does signal that the clinical trials system is facing an image issue – one that CROs as an industry and university researchers as a group might want to be aware of as the business of research continues to grow at at impressive rate while other sectors of the economy tank.