A “brilliant” (Fortune), eye-opening history of the war on cancer, The Truth in Small Doses asks why we are losing this essential fight and charts a path forward.Over the past half century, deaths from heart disease, stroke, and so many other killers have fallen dramatically. But cancer continues to kill with abandon. In 2013, despite a four-decade “war” against the disease that has cost hundreds of billions of dollars, more than 1.6 million Ameri...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes.Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, this New York Times bestseller is “an extraordinary achievement” (The New Yorker)—a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.Now includes an excerpt from Siddhartha Mukher...

**How genomics, big data, and digital technology are revolutionizing every aspect of medicine, from physical exams to drug prescriptions to organ transplants“The Creative Destruction of Medicine should be required reading by all physicians and in all medical schools. It is simply that good.” —Forbes**Technology dominates our lives, and personal genomics is revolutionizing biology. But despite the availability of technologies that can provide virtual, perso...

During her two decades at The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marcia Angell had a front-row seat on the appalling spectacle of the pharmaceutical industry. She watched drug companies stray from their original mission of discovering and manufacturing useful drugs and instead become vast marketing machines with unprecedented control over their own fortunes. She saw them gain nearly limitless influence over medical research, education, and how doctors do their jobs. She...

The promise of a regenerative medicine -- the regrowth of lost limbs and organs, new hope for patients with Alzheimer's or multiple sclerosis, the "cellular fountain of youth" -- sounds like science fiction, but it's real and on the cutting edge of medicine. Veteran medical journalist Karen van Kamped looks at this new technology through the stories of the scientists who are creating it and the ethical and legal questions with which they must deal. Many companies and universities in Canada...

"Alan Cassels strips layers of expectation, hype, jargon, false-starts, and conflicts of interest off the medical screening mantra." —Nortin M. Hadler, author of Worried SickWhy wouldn't you want to be screened to see if you're at risk for cancer, heart disease, or another potentially lethal condition? After all, better safe than sorry. Right?Not so fast, says Alan Cassels. His Seeking Sickness takes us inside the world of medical screening,...

Cancer touches everybody's life in one way or another. But most of us know very little about how the disease works, why we treat it the way we do, and the personalities whose dedication got us where we are today. For fifty years, Dr. Vincent T. DeVita Jr. has been one of those key players: he has held just about every major position in the field, and he developed the first successful chemotherapy treatment for Hodgkin's lymphoma, a breakthrough the American Society of Clinical Oncologists ...

Why has the "War on Cancer" languished, focusing mainly on finding and treating the disease and downplaying the need to control and combat cancer's basic causes -- tobacco, the workplace, radiation, and the general environment? This war has targeted the wrong enemies with the wrong weapons, failing to address well-known cancer causes.As epidemiologist Devra Davis shows in this superbly researched expose, this is no accident. The War on Cancer has followed the commercial in...

The triumphant memoir of the man behind one of the greatest feats in scientific historyOf all the scientific achievements of the past century, perhaps none can match the deciphering of the human genetic code, both for its technical brilliance and for its implications for our future. In A Life Decoded, J. Craig Venter traces his rise from an uninspired student to one of the most fascinating and controversial figures in science today. Here, Venter relates th...

Over the last twenty-five years, medicine and consumerism have been on an unchecked collision course, but, until now, the fallout from their impact has yet to be fully uncovered. A writer for The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, Carl Elliott ventures into the uncharted dark side of medicine, shining a light on the series of social and legislative changes that have sacrificed old-style doctoring to the values of consumer capitalism. Along the way, he introduce...

Here is a Human Being delivers the first in-depth look at the Personal Genome Project—the effort to construct complete genomic maps of a specific human beings—written by one of the study’s ten human participants. Misha Angrist recounts the project’s fascinating nuances, including the larger-than-life personalities of the research subjects, the entrepreneurial scientists at the helm, the bewildered and overwhelmed physicians and regulators who negotiated for it, the fascinating technology i...