-- A new initiative aimed at preventing or treating Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

 Care to argue that none of this is of consequence; that the lawyers can safely put Merck out of business, as we all sink into untroubled sleep?

 "You'll be the first jury in America to say, 'Time out, Merck,'" the creepy Mr. Lanier exhorted the Vioxx jury. What a distinction: Time out for medical research and the once ongoing war against disease and pain! 

 But did Merck do it? Did the pharmaceutical giant kill Richard Ernst by inducing him to want Vioxx? His autopsy revealed not a heart attack but an irregular heartbeat. Or, so the coroner said before Lanier flew her back from the Middle East and induced a change of outlook. She became mysteriously sure the cause of death had been heart attack.

 The clinical tests that prompted Merck to pull Vioxx from the market showed risk from heart attack increasing after 18 months of treatment. But Ernst had taken the drug only eight months -- a circumstance that failed to agitate the jury.

 Appeals courts may yet administer a partial cure for this awful affliction. One thing we can be sure of in the meantime: The quest for perfection -- and for punishment of happenstance, coincidence, and anything else available -- has no resting place in today's law courts. Just how could it rest, driven as it is by the same motive the plaintiffs' bar routinely ascribes to American business -- the base love of filthy lucre.