(in most cases innocuous) proddings of the needle.

Zhirakarov's death was far from the only bad drug reaction recorded by the review board overseeing trials at Fabre's clinics. In a letter to the FDA earlier this year, Owen Reese Jr., executive director of the Western Institutional Review Board, wrote that his board received and reviewed 12,000 such reports in 2004 alone. These tend to be serious, including "death, life-threatening events, inpatient hospitalizations, significant disability or birth defects," he wrote.

Fabre's early research on Prozac is picked apart in the popular book Talking Back to Prozac. The study that had been pivotal in gaining FDA approval not only was skewed toward a favorable response to the drug but was incredibly limited in terms of participation, authors Peter and Ginger Breggin wrote.Only 11 participants who were actually fed Prozac completed the study, and they compared their experience with those who took the placebo. But it was the work Fabre did for the Upjohn Company on the sleeping pill Halcion that got him the closest he had yet come to serious legal trouble.

Though Fabre continued to work for Upjohn through the '80s, a suit brought by area families in December 1993 alleged he falsified data collected from 1973 to 1975 while getting started in the trial business. According to the suit, Fabre ran studies back to back, repeatedly used the same patients and offered no breaks between drugs to allow the subjects' systems to cleanse -- making accurate linkages of side effects impossible.

"He would simply assign the patient a new