The conquering bureaucracy: a new history of the FDA shows how regulators entrenched and extended their own power.

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The conquering bureaucracy: a new history of the FDA shows how regulators entrenched and extended their own power.

Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA, by Daniel Carpenter, Princeton University Press, 856 pages, $29.95

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AFTER SPENDING months in the Amazon sometime in the early 1960s, a young pharmaceutical salesman just wanted to cross an airstrip and board a plane to begin his long journey home. But a Brazilian soldier had a different idea: "You can't come in."

The salesman pleaded, "I gotta come in!" The soldier pointed his rifle at the young American, unlocked the safety, and repeated, "You can't come in." The drug rep relented: "Oh, now

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