Beginning with a single dealer who lands in a small Virginia town and sets about turning high school football stars into heroin overdose statistics, journalist Beth Macy endeavors to answer a grieving mother's question -- why her only son died -- and comes away with a harrowing story of greed and need. From the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, Macy parses how America embraced a medical culture where overtreatment with painkillers became the norm....

"Veteran NPR science correspondent and award-winning radio and TV journalist Ira Flatow's enthusiasm for all things science has made him a beloved on-air journalist. For more than thirty-five years, Flatow has interviewed the top scientists and researchers on many NPR and PBS programs, including his popular Science Friday spot on Talk of the Nation. In Present at the Future, he shares the groundbreaking revelations from those conversations, including...

"Winner of the 2018 Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize, Society for East Asian Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association" Priscilla Song is assistant professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Thousands of people from more than eighty countries have traveled to China since 2001 to undergo fetal cell transplantation. Galvanized by the potential of stem and fetal cells to regenerate damaged neurons and restore lost bodily...

This short read analyses gene editing as a revolutionary new technology that could enable the design of new 'ideal' humans. What traits would be desirable? This kind of question links back to eugenic ideas that were popular in Europe in the early 1920s. Using visual communication and design references, 'Designing Humans' critiques past eugenic propaganda and speculates on its possible come back once genome editing enters the biotech market. Will the...

La vérité sur les pratiques mondiales en matière de santé et de vaccination. La poule aux œufs d'or. En matière de santé, il existe un irréductible conflit entre le pasteurisme, qui vise à détruire les microbes, et la médecine traditionnelle de Béchamp et Claude Bernard qui vise à résorber les déséquilibres physiologiques et immunitaires à l'origine de ces mêmes microbes. L'allégorie du marécage résume bien la situation. Un...

"Digital transformation" sounds harmless, given that the explosion in data volumes, processing power and Artificial Intelligence has driven humanity and the entire world to a point of no return. We will surely see a new civilization, but we are at a crossroads. The future needs to be re-invented, decisions must be taken. After the automation of factories and the creation of self-driving cars, the automation of society is on its way. But there are...

The definitive book on the rise of biotechnology and genetic modification in the world's food supply, a growing topic of fierce international debate. Biotech companies are racing to alter the genetic building blocks of the world's food. In the United States, the primary venue for this quiet revolution, the acreage of genetically modified crops has soared from zero to 70 million acres since 1996. More than half of America's processed grocery products-from...