[nnq]

It just shows that the old doc was a brave maverick that had the courage to go through with it even without the funding he needed! That's why everything probably fell through after his death. He probably funded most of it with his time and money, took all the shortcuts he could because he had to (hence the poor reliability - it failed after eight weeks), and asked the patients to pay for the rest.

It's not a dystopic science fiction story, it's how slow and cumbersome and real world engineering based medical research works, and how the only way to make any meaningful progress fast enough (if you're not in one of the few well funded and well staffed places in the world, working on one of the few projects that are considered "important"), is to work around the system, cheat and look for sloppy shortcuts, ask the poor patients for money directly, and how everything crumbles when the one genius/madman that pulled all those tricks to make it work goes out of the picture.