Dr. Alan Wu, lauded professor of laboratory medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, sought-after speaker, and lab director at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, is adapting the stories from his six books into a TV series.
The series will be a serialized drama following a lab director as she directs a team of chemists, toxicologists, and microbiologists to provide critical lab information to doctors and their patients. It will present real medical cases and show how the lab staff uses science to solve medical mysteries as patients’ lives hang in the balance.
The reviews speak for themselves : Spellbinding...This is definitely a 5-star read... A friend recommended this book to me, and once I started reading it, it was so hard to put down... This book completely changed the way I think about [everything] ... These riveting short stories expose you to the inner world of laboratory medicine...Unlike predictable books and movies where everything magically works out in the end, you never know what’s going to happen. This makes the book intense and full of uncertainty...I had no intention of reading them all in one day when I started... As entertaining as the best mystery novels.
One of the inspirations for the main character is Wu’s lab director, Dr. Barb Haller, who led the COVID-19 testing team at San Francisco General Hospital. Their efforts have contributed to San Francisco having the lowest COVID death rate of any major US city, only 600 total.
Dr. Wu was quoted in a USA Today article published on August 10, 2021 about a study showing that antibody levels my pave the way for new vaccines or boosters protecting against variants. Wu calls his lab staff the “unsung heroes” of the COVID-19 epidemic, adding that part of his motivation for creating the show is to bring them into the limelight to receive the attention they deserve.
“The inability to obtain test results was the single factor most responsible for the failure of managing the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the pandemic, few people appreciated what the clinical lab did to help doctors and their patients. I am looking to create a unique television show that provides a behind-the-scenes look at medicine through the eyes of a clinical lab director, instead of the usual focus on doctors and nurses. Samples are not just sent and an answer magically appears
