Dr. Jonathan Goodman has spent years pursuing a medical breakthrough that could change the way some of humanity's most devastating diseases are treated. In genetically altered knockout mice, his research produces results too extraordinary to ignore. Cancer. Diabetes. Hypertension. Different diseases appear to respond to the same experimental approach.
But promising results in a laboratory are not the same as proof in a human being.
Driven by the memory of his son's illness and increasingly convinced that dying patients cannot afford to wait for science to move at its usual pace, Jonathan pushes toward human trials. Four patients enter his experimental treatment carrying more than disease with them. Each brings a history, a family, a fear, and a different idea of what survival is worth.
As the treatment begins producing results no one can easily explain, the experiment becomes something larger-and more dangerous-than a search for a cure. Questions of consent, ambition, identity, prejudice, sacrifice, and scientific responsibility collide with the desperate hope that the impossible might actually work.
And at the center of it all is a secret Jonathan has convinced himself was necessary.
Because a treatment can save a life without making the choices behind it right.
Revised and substantially reconstructed for a new edition, KNOCKOUT MICE is a medical and speculative thriller about the intoxicating promise of discovery, the people asked to bear its risks, and the moral boundary between doing what is possible and doing what is justified.
