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...

Freakonomics lived on the New York Times bestseller list for an astonishing two years. Now authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner return with more iconoclastic insights and observations in SuperFreakonomics—the long awaited follow-up to their New York Times Notable blockbuster. Based on revolutionary research and original studies, SuperFreakonomics promises to once again challenge our view of human behavior and the way the world real...

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...

The eureka moments behind discoveries from penicillin to Pap smears: “A character-rich account of the role of chance in scientific research . . . Illuminating.” —Kirkus ReviewsWhat do penicillin, chemotherapy drugs, X-rays, Valium, the Pap smear, and Viagra have in common? They were each discovered accidentally, stumbled upon in the search for something else.In the 1990s, Pfizer had high hopes for a new drug that would boost blood flow to the heart...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The riveting true story of a small town ravaged by industrial pollution, “every bit as important—and as well written—as A Civil Action and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” (The Star-Ledger)“A new classic of science reporting.”—The New York Times“A gripping, page-turning environmental thriller.”—NPR“Unstoppable...

A “lively and colorful” (The Washington Post) contribution to the complex and important conversation on genetically modified foods unraveling the science, myths, and politics behind the continuing battle over biotech food.For most people, the global war over genetically modified foods is a distant and confusing one. The battles are conducted in the mystifying language of genetics.A handful of corporate “life scienc...

In The Demon Under the Microscope, Thomas Hager chronicles the dramatic history of sulfa, the first antibiotic and the drug that shaped modern medicine.The Nazis discovered it. The Allies won the war with it. It conquered diseases, changed laws, and single-handedly launched the era of antibiotics. Sulfa saved millions of lives—among them those of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr.—but its real effects are even more far reaching. Sulfa chan...

In The Future, former US Vice President Al Gore, explores the political, social and economic forces that are shaping what America and the world will become in ensuing decades. From demographics to democracy, Gore explores what he calls the 'Drivers of Global Change', framing the international conversation about the future in fresh and provocative ways.With this new work, Gore hopes to help start a conversation about the large-scale drivers of change that are defining and s...

**A 2012 New York Times Notable BookA 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Award Winner in the Science & Technology categoryAn engaging narrative about an incredible, life-giving organ and its imperiled modern fate.**Did you know that breast milk contains substances similar to cannabis? Or that it’s sold on the Internet for 262 times the price of oil? Feted and fetishized, the breast is an evolutionary masterpiece. But in the modern world, the breast is chan...

The surprising, behind-the-scenes story of how our medicines are discovered, told by a veteran drug hunter.The search to find medicines is as old as disease, which is to say as old as the human race. Through serendipity- by chewing, brewing, and snorting-some Neolithic souls discovered opium, alcohol, snakeroot, juniper, frankincense, and other helpful substances. Ötzi the Iceman, the five-thousand-year-old hunter frozen in the Italian Alps, was found to have whipw...

An investigation of the massive agribusiness company, from a winner of the Rachel Carson Prize: "Well supported by wide-ranging scientific evidence." — Kirkus ReviewsThe result of a remarkable three-year-long investigation that took award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin across four continents, The World According to Monsanto tells the little-known yet shocking story of this agribusiness giant—the ...

When Speaker Newt Gingrich greeted Dr. David Lewis in his office overlooking the National Mall, he looked at Dr. Lewis and said: “You know you’re going to be fired for this, don’t you?” “I know,” Dr. Lewis replied, “I just hope to stay out of prison.” Gingrich had just read Dr. Lewis’s commentary in Nature, titled “EPA Science: Casualty of Election Politics.” Three years later, and thirty years after Dr. Lewis began working at EPA, he was back in Washington to receive a S...