Medical medium

Prepare for the latest horror story on health. Ken Begg, senior scientific officer at an Edinburgh University Medical Research Council unit, is about to publish his latest medical thriller.

Dr Begg, writing under the pen name Ken McClure, has an uncanny knack of predicting medical calamities only months before they occur. In his novel Crisis, published before the first news on BSE broke, young farmers began to die suddenly of a strange brain disease.

A mysterious flesh-eating condition, immune to drugs, appeared in Chameleon. Pestilence heralded the return of bubonic plague. His eighth novel, Pandora's Helix, published next week, focuses on the cutting edge of gene therapy, with unscrupulous techniques inadvertently unleashing disease on the public.