The Cure

The book that inspired the movie, Extraordinary Measures, starring Harrison Ford, Brendan Fraser, and Keri Russell, The Cure by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Geeta Anand is the remarkable true story of one father’s determination to find a cure for his terminally sick children even if it meant he had to build a business from scratch to do so.

With three beautiful children, a new house, and financial security, John and Aileen Crowley were on top of the world—until their two youngest children, fifteen-month-old Megan and five-month-old Patrick, were diagnosed with Pompe disease and given only months to live. Refusing to accept a death sentence, John quit his financial consultant job and invested his life savings in a biotechnology start-up to research the disease and find a cure. Battling scientific setbacks, conflict of interest accusations, and business troubles, John and Aileen would be tested to their limits as they valiantly fought, and succeeded, in finding revolutionary new treatment for the disease—offering hope to Megan, Patrick, and the many children and families affected by Pompe disease around the world.

Author Biography

Geeta Anand is a journalist and author who serves as dean and professor at Berkeley Journalism. Her stories on corporate corruption won the Wall Street Journal a Pulitzer Prize in 2002, and she was lead reporter in a series on healthcare that was a finalist in 2003. Her book The Cure—about a dad’s fight to save his kids by starting a biotech company to make a medicine for their untreatable illness—was made into the Harrison Ford movie Extraordinary Measures in 2010. She worked as a journalist for twenty-seven years, most recently as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in India.