"The epic and controversial story of a major breakthrough in cell biology that led to the creation of some of the world's most important vaccines. Until the late 1960s, tens of thousands of American children suffered crippling birth defects if their mothers had been exposed to rubella, popularly known as German measles, while pregnant; there was no vaccine and little understanding of how the disease devastated fetuses. In June 1962, a young biologist...

On a September Morning in 1973, a hospital administrator in New York City learned of a rogue experiment in progress at his institution and ordered the destruction of a test tube containing a frothy mixture of human eggs and sperm. Had the experiment been allowed to continue, it might have resulted in the first human fetus created through in vitro fertilization. In Pandora's Baby, the award-winning journalist Robin Marantz Henig tells the story of...

An analysis of the psychological forces behind the transformation of Nazi doctors into mass murderers in Auschwitz and other "death camps."

The forty year "Tuskegee" Syphilis Study has become the American metaphor for medical racism, government malfeasance, and physician arrogance. The subject of histories, films, rumors, and political slogans, it received an official federal apology from President Bill Clinton in a White House ceremony. The author offers an analysis of the notorious study of untreated syphilis, which took place in and around Tuskegee, Alabama, from the 1930s through...