Jamie Brodie 01 - Cited to Death

Oliver, MD, PhD, and Alana Wray, MD, were the medical directors of Fertility Research. Benjamin Goldstein, MD, was apparently their employee. Fertility Research seemed to be a small, privately-funded organization, renting space in one of the medical office buildings adjacent to Cedars. Its website was pretty basic, but it did include the doctors’ credentials and a list of their publications.
    Oliver, Wray, and Goldstein were graduates of US medical schools. Oliver had done a stint at Cambridge University, doing post-fellowship work in stem cell research back in 2002-3. Then he’d come to LA and joined forces with Wray, who had done postdoctoral training at NIH. They applied for a grant to open their own lab; a year after that, they’d published their first of many articles. The 2007 article that I now had was their big breakthrough. Both doctors were listed as clinical faculty at USC medical school, but I couldn’t find any evidence that they actually taught anything. Maybe they taught stem cell research. Goldstein, for his part, had co-written articles with Wray and Oliver since the 2007 paper, but hadn’t gone to work for the lab until 2010, when he’d finished his OB-GYN residency at USC.
    After the publication of the 2007 article, Oliver and Wray’s lab had no difficulties in getting funded. At least every other month, Oliver was pictured accepting a very large check from a “sponsor.” Oliver’s name was in the “Living” section of the LA Times a couple of times a year. He and his wife hosted fundraisers at their Bel-Air home for various charities. Everyone looked tastefully wealthy. Wray’s name turned up more often in the results of West Coast triathlons, finishing in the top three in her age group, 40-45. One article had a blurry picture of her crossing a finish line, but her face was covered with a ball cap and it wasn’t possible to tell what she looked like. There was a feature article from 2009 on the lab itself; Oliver was pictured, and Wray spoke movingly about her lifelong quest for better answers to the problem of infertility.
    Benjamin Goldstein didn’t turn up in any news at all other than his appointment to the lab.
    The Welsh authors were a different story. David Hughes and Marc Llewellyn had been researchers at a similar lab at Oxford until mid-2003. They had also published a series of papers, but none of them were breakthroughs. The papers had been published in decreasingly prestigious journals, until their last article, the one cited by Dan in his letter, had appeared in the Welsh Medical Journal. The funding for the lab dried up, and it was closed. Neither man had ever published again. Interestingly, the existence of Hughes and Llewellyn’s lab overlapped in time with Tristan Oliver’s years at Cambridge. Oliver might have known Hughes and Llewellyn. It wasn’t unusual for researchers with a narrow specialty to be professionally incestuous. Everyone in a unique subspecialty knew everyone else, whether it was Celtic warrior queen Boudicca (the subject of my doctoral dissertation) or stem cell fertility research.
    The most surprising information about Hughes and Llewellyn was that they were both dead. David Hughes had died in 2006 of a heart attack while on his morning jog. He had been in his 60s. Marc Llewellyn had died in 2003, not long after the publication of his last article, in a horrific car crash on the M40 outside Oxford. I flinched involuntarily; I’d been on that stretch of road many times. The accident had been a hit-and-run; one car, driven by Llewellyn, had been nearly destroyed. The other was never found, and there were no witnesses, so the investigation had gone nowhere. Llewellyn wasn’t killed outright, but suffered severe head trauma and passed away the next day.
    I considered what I had learned. Two articles, three dead men. Was it just bad luck? It didn’t seem to be bad luck for Oliver et al. They were doing just fine. Hughes’s death seemed ordinary enough, and on the surface, so did Dan’s. Llewellyn’s car accident was likely just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
    The article titles made more sense now. It was as I’d originally thought. Hughes and Llewellyn hadn’t been successful with their research, so they’d published their last article and given it up. Oliver had probably become aware of Hughes and Llewellyn’s work when he was in Cambridge, and had come back to the U.S. to continue the research in his own lab. A