Jim MacWaide is a quirky, brilliant biochemist living in New York. He spends his days with his eye glued to his microscope at the global headquarters of his pharmaceutical company bosses. But his mind is taken up as much with anxieties about past loves, and an obsession with his piano teacher, who is helping him to become an accomplished jazz musician.
Coming from a renowned Napa wine-making family, Jim has spent three years obsessively experimenting on the properties of Resveratrol, an extract of the red grape. After achieving miraculous results in regenerating human tissue cells, he shares 90% of his discovery with the firm, but quickly gets cold feet. Realizing too late, he's certain that once the ruthless pharma giant gets hold of the 'Holy Grail' of cures, only the rich will be saved from cancer - by a drug that costs ten dollars to produce.
When Jim refuses to reveal the last, vital code, his bosses hire an ex-Guantanamo interrogator to torture the goods out of him. Saved by a last minute tip-off, Jim hits the road, pursued by the relentless bounty-hunter in a race to find a non-profit organization for his miracle cure.
If ignominiously wrenched from his comfort zone, this terrifying journey liberates Jim's 'inner man' and hitherto unknown strengths to outwit his nemesis for the common good.
In The Cancer Code, Andrew Findlay writes with the intimate knowledge of an author who has researched his subject thoroughly. Having lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles (where he worked for ten years as a Hollywood screenwriter), his descriptions of both urban and rural America take the reader on a thrilling road trip as MacWaide attempts to evade his bosses' emissaries and the inevitable torture which would follow his capture.
Findlay's experience as a screenwriter for both the large and small screen bring every scene to life as this thrilling adventure unfolds.