February 14, 2022
(NPR) – Until the emergence of COVID-19, tuberculosis was the deadliest infectious disease in the world. How did it evolve from a terrible disease to a largely controlled one to the horrific plague it is now? That’s the question that … Read More
October 21, 2021
(New York Review of Books) – Though Ishiguro has said in more than one interview that working with the homeless influenced his fiction, he has also been careful not to write about his social work directly. This is in part … Read More
March 19, 2021
(Wired) – That fall—before lying down in the back of the bus from Toronto to New York, taking the train 2,700 miles to Truckee, California, at the crest of the Sierra Nevadas, and then stretching across the back seat of … Read More
February 18, 2021
(Financial Times) For all the headlines generated by the experiment in Shenzhen, it did not spark a global ethical debate about Crispr, the gene-editing technology that will almost certainly be used to change the course of life. While the world clashed … Read More
January 26, 2021
(The New Yorker) – The Blackwells were medical pioneers, but, except for a few professional awards named in their honor and a plaque commemorating the location of their infirmary, they have largely been forgotten. A new biography by the writer … Read More
January 18, 2021
(Nature) – It was a time of contagion and quacks. A Machiavellian power-broker keen to protect his position defied tradition to sponsor controlled experiments on the most marginalized of people. It was 1524. The Italian surgeon Gregorio Caravita offered Pope … Read More
October 30, 2020
(Marie Claire) – Over the past decade, award-winning director Erika Cohn has investigated a horrific abuse that’s one of America’s best-kept secrets: forced sterilization. The procedure, considered a form of modern-day eugenics that’s historically been associated with Nazi Germany and … Read More
July 16, 2020
(Irish Tech News) Trans-humanist theory is contextualised within the 2014 science-fiction thriller “Ex Machina” and also within formal animation, such as the 1999 animated classic “The Iron Giant”. Despite both films showing trans-humanist logic, there are clear distinctions in the way … Read More
July 13, 2020
(NYT) On Wednesday, Peacock premieres an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 science fiction novel. The world the book anticipated — designer drugs, casual sex, near-instant gratification — is already here.
May 28, 2020
(Science) – The Coming Good Society offers a cursory overview of the state of human rights in an age of emerging technologies. More accessible narrative than academic treatise, this enjoyable read examines how changing norms create opportunities to expand the … Read More
May 25, 2020
(The Guardian) – McGregor has set this out in her new book Sex Matters. It’s a wake-up call, a cry for action, a frightening and fascinating read. The takeaway message is that women’s bodies are different to men’s from cellular … Read More
April 15, 2020
(Science) – Jack Price’s engaging book The Future of Brain Repair details past, present, and future attempts to address Cajal’s formidable challenge. In so doing, it provides a vibrant and compelling guide to the important and rapidly evolving fields of stem cell–based … Read More
January 16, 2020
(The Atlantic) – The authors of the new book Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships really, really want readers to know they have not written a book promoting love potions—drugs that will hypnotize, brainwash, or otherwise ensnare people into … Read More
December 27, 2019
(Undark) – The moment her illness was deemed neurological, ”as in physical, in the body, real,” rather than psychiatric, “in the mind and therefore somehow less real,” the quality of her care drastically improved, Cahalan writes in her new book, … Read More
December 23, 2019
(Australian Broadcasting Co) – When we talk about Charles Darwin, it is rarely in the same breath that we discuss the modern-day internet algorithms which are dividing society with selective information. But according to the author of a book examining … Read More
December 13, 2019
(The New Yorker) – In a new book, “Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family,” the author Sophie Lewis makes a forceful argument for legalization. Lewis takes little interest in the parents. It’s the surrogates who concern her. Regulation, she … Read More
November 12, 2019
(New York Times) – Anyone who has been a caregiver will relate to the unending grind of Joan’s decline, to Kleinman’s exhaustion and to his efforts to keep going. And he’s one of the lucky ones: He has the financial … Read More
October 29, 2019
(Nature) – Rosenhan’s study had far-reaching and much-needed effects on psychiatric care in the United States and elsewhere. By the 1980s, most psychology textbooks were quoting it. It also influenced society more widely, and not always positively: in the law … Read More
October 29, 2019
(Science) – A small bundle of human nerve cells are being cultured in a petri dish. The cells divide. They differentiate into cell types found in the brain. The cell network grows dense and develops brain-like structures—layers and folds. The … Read More
October 25, 2019
(Newsweek) – A devastating string of mass shootings has left the country reeling this year. But an even greater threat may be looming in the near future, one with the potential to cause far more widespread injury and loss of … Read More
October 22, 2019
(NPR) – Americans are losing trust in their doctors, says Dr. Marty Makary in his new book, The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care — and How to Fix It. The reason, he argues, is that medical care … Read More
September 20, 2019
(Undark) – Medical textbooks like Oxford Medical Education dryly state that “the aim of the ABCDE assessment is to keep the patient alive and achieve the first steps to improvement.” Emergency physicians and nurses across the world use the ABCDE … Read More
September 20, 2019
(CNN) – “You learn a lot by almost dying,” he says. He learned enough to surprise his doctors by coming up with a way to treat his disease. Almost six years later he’s in remission, he and his wife have … Read More
September 13, 2019
(Undark) – In 2015, George Church, a geneticist at Harvard University, announced a stunning breakthrough: Working with pig embryos, he and his colleagues had managed to disable 62 different retrovirus genes in one fell swoop. “This would have been virtually … Read More
August 27, 2019
(Science) – Major academic figures admonish “immoral experiments on the unborn.” An advertisement in The New York Times cautions about the “unknowable risks to human lives.” A government official calls for an ethics board to investigate “attempts to control the … Read More
