Community Reads

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells-- taken without her knowledge in 1951-- became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, and more. Henrietta's cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can't afford health insurance. This phenomenal New York Times bestseller tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew.

Strange Career offers a clear and illuminating analysis of the history of Jim Crow laws and American race relations. This book presented evidence that segregation in the South dated only to the 1880s. It's publication in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court ordered schools be desegregated,helped counter arguments that the ruling would destoy a centuries-old way of life. The commemorative edition includes a special afterword by William S. McFeely, former Woodward student and winner of both the 1982 Pulitzer Prize and 1992 Lincoln Prize. As William McFeely describes in the newafterword, 'the slim volume's social consequence far outstripped its importance to academia. The book became part of a revolution...The Civil Rights Movement had changed Woodward's South and his slim, quietly insistent book...had contributed to that change.'

During its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, the Bethlehem Steel mill at Sparrows Point near Baltimore was one of the world's largest steel plants, employing as many as 30,000 workers. But these glory years were short-lived, as the American steel industry soon collapsed, taking with it the high-income industrial jobs that many Sparrows Point workers had come to enjoy. This familiar tale of decline in America's industrial heartland is only part of the story, however. In response to downsizing and job loss at Sparrows Point, many women entered the workforce to fulfill the needs of their families living in the adjacent communities of Turners Station and Dundalk. Wives of Steel tells the story of these women who broke traditional gender roles and, in the process, contributed to the economic survival of their communities. Wives of Steel is based on more than eighty formal interviews conducted over a fifteen-year period with women and some men, both white and black, all of whom were part of Sparrows Point as workers, spouses, or longtime residents of the local communities. Through the stories they tell, we see how a male-dominated industry has influenced personal, family, and social experiences over several generations. We also see the distinct differences and surprising similarities between the lives of black and white women, which often reflect the complicated relationships among black and white steelworkers in the plant. Deindustrialization has transformed many of America's cities and communities, often in devastating ways. For women in particular, the changes in family and work life have been far more complex and in many ways more positive in their consequences than many studies have led us to expect. Combining consummate research with vivid firsthand accounts, Wives of Steel tells a story that continues to be played out in communities across America as working-class families are forced to cope with a globalizing economy.

In this book, the first long-term follow-up study of alcohol use among Native Americans, a physician and sociologist and an anthropologist examine the data on three groups of Navajos whom they first interviewed about their use of alcohol in 1966. The authors find verification for their initial hypothesis that young men who would have been classed as alcoholic often stop or moderate their drinking as they age. They also find that there is considerable diversity in patterns of alcohol use among both women and men. Stephen J. Kunitz and Jerrold E. Levy study the histories of those who have died as well as those who have survived since the first study was done. They show that, compared to those who have survived, the former were more likely to have been solitary drinkers and were on average younger at the time when they were first interviewed. The authors also present data for the entire Navajo population on changing mortality from alcohol-related causes from the 1960s to the present; they compare alcohol-related death rates among Navajos to those among rural Anglos in Arizona and New Mexico; they analyze two family histories--one of a family with severe alcohol problems, the other of a family with none--that illustrate how traditional patterns of wealth have shaped the way people have learned to use alcohol; they study the factors that may have led to the emergence of a solitary, unrestrained drinking style among some Navajos; and they describe the changes in treatment programs and the transformation of traditional healing systems as they are integrated into a bureaucratized health care system.

From 1932 to 1972, the United States Public Health Service conducted a non-therapeutic experiment involving over 400 black male sharecroppers infected with syphilis. The Tuskegee Study had nothing to do with treatment. Its purpose was to trace the spontaneous evolution of the disease in order to learn how syphilis affected black subjects. From 1932 to 1972, the United States Public Health Service conducted a non-therapeutic experiment involving over 400 black male sharecroppers infected with syphilis. The Tuskegee Study had nothing to do with treatment. Its purpose was to trace the spontaneous evolution of the disease in order to learn how syphilis affected black subjects. The men were not told they had syphilis; they were not warned about what the disease might do to them; and, with the exception of a smattering of medication during the first few months, they were not given health care. Instead of the powerful drugs they required, they were given aspirin for their aches and pains. Health officials systematically deceived the men into believing they were patients in a government study of "bad blood", a catch-all phrase black sharecroppers used to describe a host of illnesses. At the end of this 40 year deathwatch, more than 100 men had died from syphilis or related complications. "Bad Blood" provides compelling answers to the question of how such a tragedy could have been allowed to occur. Tracing the evolution of medical ethics and the nature of decision making in bureaucracies, Jones attempted to show that the Tuskegee Study was not, in fact, an aberration, but a logical outgrowth of race relations and medical practice in the United States. Now, in this revised edition of "Bad Blood", Jones traces the tragic consequences of the Tuskegee Study over the last decade. A new introduction explains why the Tuskegee Study has become a symbol of black oppression and a metaphor for medical neglect, inspiring a prize-winning play, a Nova special, and a motion picture. A new concluding chapter shows how the black community's wide-spread anger and distrust caused by the Tuskegee Study has hampered efforts by health officials to combat AIDS in the black community. "Bad Blood" was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and was one of the "N.Y. Times" 12 best books of the year.

How did cells make the journey, one we take so much for granted, from their origin in living bodies to something that can be grown and manipulated on artificial media in the laboratory, a substantial biomass living outside a human body, plant, or animal? This is the question at the heart of Hannah Landecker's book. She shows how cell culture changed the way we think about such central questions of the human condition as individuality, hybridity, and even immortality and asks what it means that we can remove cells from the spatial and temporal constraints of the body and "harness them to human intention." Rather than focus on single discrete biotechnologies and their stories--embryonic stem cells, transgenic animals--Landecker documents and explores the wider genre of technique behind artificial forms of cellular life. She traces the lab culture common to all those stories, asking where it came from and what it means to our understanding of life, technology, and the increasingly blurry boundary between them. The technical culture of cells has transformed the meaning of the term "biological," as life becomes disembodied, distributed widely in space and time. Once we have a more specific grasp on how altering biology changes what it is to be biological, Landecker argues, we may be more prepared to answer the social questions that biotechnology is raising.

His historic career as an aviator made Charles Lindbergh one of the most famous men of the twentieth century, the subject of best-selling biographies and a hit movie, as well as the inspiration for a dance step--the Lindy Hop--that he himself was too shy to try. But for all the attention lavished on Lindbergh, one story has remained untold until now: his macabre scientific collaboration with Dr. Alexis Carrel. This oddest of couples--one a brilliant Nobel Prize-winning surgeon turned social engineer, the other a failed dirt farmer turned hero of the skies--joined forces in 1930 driven by a shared and secret dream: to conquer death and attain immortality. Part Frankenstein, part The Professor and the Madman, and all true, The Immortalists is the remarkable story of how two men of prodigious achievement and equally large character flaws challenged nature's oldest rule, with consequences--personal, professional, and political--that neither man anticipated.

Jonas Salk's polio vaccine is regarded as a veritbale medical miracle, for it largely eradicated one of the most feared diseases of the 20th century. But the story of the vaccine has a dark side, one that has never been fully told before. Between 1954 and 1963, close to 98 million Americans received polio vaccinations contaminated with a carcinogenic monkey virus, now known as SV40. The government downplayed the incident, and it was generally accepted that although oncogenic to lab animals, SV40 was harmless to humans. But now SV40 is showing up in human cancers, and prominent researchers are demanding a serious public health response to this forgotten polio vaccine contaminant. A gripping medical detective story,The Virus and the Vaccine raises major questions about vaccine policy.

In recent years, increasing concern has been voiced about the nature and extent of human experimentation and its impact on the investigator, subject, science, and society. This casebook represents the first attempt to provide comprehensive materials for studying the human experimentation process. Through case studies from medicine, biology, psychology, sociology, and law--as well as evaluative materials from many other disciplines--Dr. Katz examines the problems raised by human experimentation from the vantage points of each of its major participants--investigator, subject, professions, and state. He analyzes what kinds of authority should be delegated to these participants in the formulation, administration, and review of the human experimentation process. Alternative proposals, from allowing investigators a completely free hand to imposing centralized governmental control, are examined from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The conceptual framework of Experimentation with Human Beings is designed to facilitate not only the analysis of such concepts as "harm," "benefit," and "informed consent," but also the exploration of the problems raised by man's quest for knowledge and mastery, his willingness to risk human life, and his readiness to delegate authority to professionals and rely on their judgment.

Clearly argued and written in nontechnical language, this book provides a definitive account of informed consent. It begins by presenting the analytic framework for reasoning about informed consent found in moral philosophy and law. The authors then review and interpret the history ofinformed consent in clinical medicine, research, and the courts. They argue that respect for autonomy has had a central role in the justification and function of informed consent requirements. Then they present a theory of the nature of informed consent that is based on an appreciation of itshistorical roots. An important contribution to a topic of current legal and ethical debate, this study is accessible to everyone with a serious interest in biomedical ethics, including physicians, philosophers, policy makers, religious ethicists, lawyers, and psychologists. This timely analysismakes a significant contribution to the debate about the rights of patients and subjects.

During and after the days of slavery in the United States, one way in which slaveowners, overseers, and other whites sought to control the black population was to encourage and exploit a fear of the supernatural. By planting rumors of evil spirits, haunted places, body-snatchers, and "night doctors--even by masquerading as ghosts themselves--they discouraged the unauthorized movement of blacks, particularly at night, by making them afraid of meeting otherworldly beings. Blacks out after dark also risked encounters with "patterollers" (mounted surveillance patrols) or, following the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan. Whatever their guise, all of these "night riders" had one purpose: to manipulate blacks through terror and intimidation. First published in 1975, this book explores the gruesome figure of the night rider in black folk history. Gladys-Marie Fry skillfully draws on oral history sources to show that, quite apart from its veracity, such lore became an important facet of the lived experience of blacks in America. This classic work continues to be a rich source for students and teachers of folklore, African American history, and slavery and postemancipation studies.