He went back and clicked on STUDY PROCEDURES. This section explained how the reporting was structured. He still held out hope that the names of the discharged patients in the clinical trials could be accessed somehow. In the past, when the FDA tested drugs, it often happened that the names of the participants were not revealed to the monitor, or to anybody. The policy was intended to preserve the privacy of study participants. But lately it had been under review. All that secrecy and non-accountability had permitted some spectacular fabrication of test data. Surely the NIH had taken this into consideration by now and come up with a system whereby the identities of the participants could be checked and verified. That information had to be stored somewhere. No such luck. It appeared the NIH had begun using a modified version of the new FDA sunshine policy. NIH clinical trials had a "one week of sunshine" provision, during which the suitability of test subjects could be evaluated by a review procedure. During that time, their real identity was in the database. But after that, the identity information of any patient actually selected for inclusion in the clinical trials was encoded--where thenceforth it could only be accessed through a lengthy legal process. Screwed again. At this late date, the Gerex Corporation surely was not going to be adding any new names and giving them that week of sunshine. According to press releases at the beginning of the clinical trials, when Gerex was a lot more communicative, at this date the entire study should be just days away from being wrapped up. He went back to the patient files one last time, out of frustration. As he continued to scroll, he noticed that although the identities of patients and crucial personal data were encrypted, the dates on which they entered and finished the trials were all supplied. Hmmm. It was actually more detailed than that. There were dates for when a patient entered each stage of the procedure: Screening, Initial Evaluation, Admitted into Program, Procedure Under Way, Procedure Monitoring, Results Evaluation, Patient Release, Patient Follow-up. The time between screening and patient release averaged around five weeks, six weeks at most Looking at the time-sequenced data, you couldn't avoid the conclusion that the clinical trials had been a spectacular success. No doubt the specific data would reveal whether there had been any adverse reactions, but as clinical trials go, these seemed to have been without major incident. He had a nose for trouble, and these looked as rigorous as clockwork. . . . Hold on a second. . . . _That's_ odd. What the data structure did not have was a category for Termination. Yet one of the patients had been listed with dates leading up to and including Procedure Under Way, but after that the patient was noted parenthetically as having been "terminated." That was all the information given. What could that mean?