What he does not seem to enjoy are the rounds of public relations activities he must perform. When I spoke with him last week he had just finished a Boston talk show a few days before and a New York talk show the night before. He was just finishing up a speech he would give two days later to a consumers' group. And he had to interrupt our interview for ten minutes to tape a segment for a New York radio station.

The doctor is not used to all this. He spends three hours a day taking blood samples and looking at red throats in his tiny office in the tiny dispensary at the Business School. Four years ago, Burack stopped teaching pharmacology at the Med School and set up a private practice, which he still has in addition to his UHS duties ("and it's suffering," he says).

Dirty Looks

When he started his practice he had no idea that brand name drugs cost so much more than generics or that there was politics involved in the mess. He prescribed generics almost exclusively, simply because those were the names he knew, being a pharmacology instructor.

"I was getting a lot of dirty looks," he said, "from druggists and from my colleagues, and I couldn't understand it. Then one day a pharmacist called me up and asked me to be his personal physician. 'You're the only doctor who prescribes generics. so you must really know something,' he told me. Then I found out about the tremendous price differences. I really had not known until then. What I wanted to do first was just to make up mimeographed sheets of price differences and distribute them to the teaching hospitals."

The more Burack looked into it, the bigger the business became. He wanted to publish an article in one of the medical journals but "a senior Harvard physician" warned him that he would antagonize his colleagues and probably never get it published any-