Although it is 10 p.m., and Paul Bernstein, M.D., has spent four hours in surgery at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Diego, his evening is not over. Bernstein will go home, sit down at his computer, and spend the next two hours working on his latest novel.

This is just a glimpse of the energy and dedication this graduate of UCSD School of Medicine pours into his twin passions: providing the best possible care for his patients as Kaiser's San Diego Medical Director, and sharing great stories through his fiction.

These passions came together when Bernstein published Courage to Heal, a historical novel telling the true story of Dr. Sidney Garfield, who along with industrialist Henry Kaiser, forever changed American medicine.

Bernstein's love of history--he's the founder of the Kaiser Permanente Historical Society--also fueled his desire to tell Garfield's story. In fact, Bernstein was actually a history major when he attended UCLA, but eventually chose a medical career after being accepted by UCSD.

Bernstein began writing fiction a decade ago. After years of taking classes, joining writers' groups and spending countless hours at his craft, Bernstein's "Courage to Heal" was published last fall to strong reviews and several awards, including winning in the San Diego Book Awards, the New England Book Festival, and the London Book Festival.

Flashblind, Bernstein's latest medical thriller, exposes one of the greatest government conspiracies of our time. Is it a coincidence that the two most significant scientific races, namely, the development of the atomic bomb and the sequencing of the genetic code both took place in Los Alamos, New Mexico? Based on the Proceedings from the Freedom of Information Act, Flashblind uncovers government sponsored human radiation experiments, using humans as guinea pigs.
In Flashblind, Jake Holden, a world class geneticist, has less than a month to complete his life's goal to find the gene responsible for his brother's rare genetic disorder, a gene that controls our body's ability to repair itself and provides the key for the cure for cancer. Bernstein again weaves fact and fiction in a way that will engage and challenge the reader.