Brian Deer: journalism

Tokyo pop? Japan looks more American every year, adding credence to the view that the world is destined for a monocultural future. (Photograph: Brian Deer)

Wellcome stranger: Nobel laureate Dr George H Hitchings Jr, inventor of Septrin-Bactrim ingredient trimethoprim, interviewed at the Burroughs-Wellcome headquarters at Research Triangle Park, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. (Photograph: Brian Deer)

End of empire: After this investigation by Brian Deer, Sir Henry Wellcome's UK and US pharmaceutical organisation broke up

First paragraphs
by Brian Deer

"On Friday, October 26, 1973, Dr John Wilson, paediatric neurologist, stepped to the front of the London lecture theatre of the Royal Society of Medicine. For the past couple of hours he had been crammed among 50 professors, consultants and other specialists, listening to research and discussion papers about children's convulsive disorders. Now it was his turn to address the gathering. He slipped a typescript on the lectern and began to read." [Read this]

"Justin Fashanu lit a marijuana joint and grinned an enormous, lopsided grin at a roomful of teenage kids. He felt pumped-up. He was in control. He could see it in the faces around him. No crowded football terraces roared him on, but the former soccer striker was back. Forgotten, if only briefly, was a lifetime of troubles, failures and forced retreats. Amid a smell of smoke and beer in a rented Maryland apartment, the grass hit. He felt a rush." [Read this]

"Forty years ago last month, a letter appeared in The Sunday Times that was to produce a remarkable effect. It was from the Bishop of Portsmouth, one Launcelot Fleming, who proposed a new form of social action to bolster Britain's impact overseas. He had just finished chairing a committee of the nation's great and good that had probed the then-emerging rock 'n' roll culture - and he had come to the conclusion that there was Something To Be Done with what he described as "suitable boys". Rather than be corrupted by newfangled pinball machines, motor scooters and other contemporary vices, he felt that young chaps (he never mentioned girls) should go and do Good Work around the world." [Read this]

"Matthew Bell lay on the sofa in the front room of his home and snuggled against a cushion half as big as himself as he gazed at Batman Forever on video. He was crazy about superheroes in serious outfits - Batman, Spiderman, Fireman Sam - and cut quite a figure himself as a blond-haired Superman at his local toddlers' group in Torrisholme, Morecambe. But on this Monday afternoon - it was nearly 4pm - his attention to the movie faltered. He had started to feel odd sometime earlier in the day, and now he had a pain in his tummy. Matthew grasped the cushion in a vain search for comfort, and wished the hurting would go away." [Read this]

"When each morning's swarms of 747s arrive from North America, form into line and drop their wheels over London, window-seat passengers may read a telling message from the country that lies below. As the aircraft turn away from the sun to descend westward into Heathrow, they pass four giant cream-coloured chimneys that rise from a crumbling cathedral of bricks. On the south bank of the Thames, by a big patch of grass and trees, the ruined power station at Battersea signals. A beacon on the flight path of time." [Read this]

"Were you to travel to central London and stand outside the seven-story building at 183 Euston Road, you wouldn't think, to look at it, that you were close to anything of note. The structure's white Portland stone facade and Greek-columned central pavilion are reminiscent of nothing more memorable than, say, a US courthouse, or a downsized Bank of England. The external elevations are self-important but unimaginative. To set eyes on them once is to forget them." [Read this]

"When Justine Gibbs died after taking Septrin, her mother Susanne's reaction was to blame herself. Maybe if they had gone to the hospital more quickly, she agonised, something might have been done to save her daughter's life. Possibly, she speculated, there was a genetic weakness at work, passed down through the family, with herself as the link. Or perhaps, she even debated, her loss was a divine punishment for some past parental misdeed." [Read this]

"Nine years before she would announce the discovery of a new disease, Dr Rosemary Basson, consultant in the Centre for Sexual Medicine at Vancouver General Hospital, Canada, got a phone call from a medical research company working for the New York-based drug giant Pfizer. Would her clinic be interested in joining a trial of Viagra, the now-famous penis-stiffening blue pill?" [Read this]

"When in 1850 the first steam engines came chugging through south London on the new Chatham and Dover Railway, the noise, the grime and the curiosity were all too much for the nuns of Nazareth House. Confronted with the disturbance of the industrial revolution, they packed their bibles, sold their land, and on the site of their convent up sprang perhaps Britain's greatest single landmark of Christian charity." [Read this]

"Once a month, at around 3pm, Dr Donald Francis, president of the VaxGen corporation, boards a 747 at San Francisco airport for an 18-hour flight to Bangkok. The route is unpopular - with maddening stops in Seoul, Hong Kong or Taipei - and he insulates himself in a business class window seat with earplugs, eye-mask and face-cream. The tedium drives him crazy, but he doesn't sleep much. His adrenaline levels stay high. Speculations loop like a tape through his head: 'What if I do? Supposing I don't?'" [Read this]

"Blaze Bayley springs and snarls into a storm of teenage boys. It is a fake kind of spring and a contrived kind of snarl - the moves of the nerd with the air guitar in front of the bedroom mirror. But the boys are with him. They want him to win. And a sea of their fists joins a chant "Maiden...Maiden." He shakes his forearms in mock rage at the sky." [Read this]

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