On a recent sunday while dusting my closet(often on sundays I do it..now thats a revelation) I found an old book of mine "Brain" by Robin Cook. Interestingly I did'nt read this book as a serious reader but it was to just kill time while travelling in local trains in Mumbai. My dad being a doctor I was quite familiar to medical terms and Brain itself sounded so intriguing for a topic to read on. Brain has been quite a fascination with scientists since ages and till date we have not been able to decode it. Robin Cook is famous for his medical thrillers which have futuristic element to it and this book is no different. Completely engrossing and cant-be-put-down-for-a-moment kind of book.
The story is mostly about Katherine Collins who goes to a hospital called GYN where she undergoes treament for some gynac problems. Simaltaneously she starts having seizeures where in she smells a repulsive and oddly familiar smell and then loses consciousness. The story revolves around the protagonist Dr. Martin Philips from then on, who is a doctor in neurophysiology at the NYC medical center. Dr. Martin Philips, a 41 year old is involved in creating a self-diagonstic x-ray machine, along with Michael, who is a researcher at MIT and also head of the department of artificial intelligence. His girlfriend and colleague Dr.Denise Sanger (28 years old) is also involved in the same hospital.
The story proceeds with the hospital working being shown where Dr. Mannerheim is to operate on a girl named Lisa Marino who is a seizure patient. She is set to undergo a brain operation to get rid of a part of her brain cells which her doctors say is causing her seizures. The symptoms are described same as like Kathereine Collins only stronger.
However, when Dr. Philips starts to discover a conspiracy involving usage of human test subjects, he is drawn into a world that is deceiving and dangerous.
It still amazes me that such an extraordinary masterpiece was written in 1981 when people would have hardly known anything about artificial intelligence. Also Dr Cook with his varied imagination peeps into the future to find out how Super Computers of tomorrow would work, his hypothesis is that they would be a computer wired to a human brain (Phew!!!). Very interesting and rivetting novel with great intensity and thrill at every moment, especially the description of Katherine being unconcious on return home in the elevators and when she gains consciousness finds herself being visited by her parents and police as she has been missing since some days gives you goose bumps.
The book is available for free download on Google books, so that means you dont have to clean the dirty closets on sundays to grab your copy of the book as I did. Nevertheless the effort was worth it!!!
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