Reading Map: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Undue Risk : Secret State Experiments on Humans
Jonathan D. Moreno 174.28 MOR
Between 1949 and 1969, the U.S. Army conducted over 200 "field tests" as part of its biological warfare research program, releasing infectious bacterial agents in cities across the U.S. without informing residents of the exposed areas, Moreno reveals in this chilling, meticulously documented casebook. A professor of biomedical ethics at the University of Virginia, Moreno (Arguing Euthanasia) served on a Clinton-appointed advisory committee that blew the lid off the government's secret radiation experiments from WWII through the mid-1970s, which involved the injection of unwitting human volunteers with plutonium, uranium and other radioactive substances. Moreno's survey extends from Walter Reed's turn-of-the-century yellow fever research to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study; from army and air force mind control experiments (1950—1975) involving ingestion of LSD and incapacitating chemicals by thousands of subjects, often without their consent, to the compulsory vaccination of Gulf War Gis with botulism toxin vaccine not approved by the FDA that may have contributed to "Gulf war syndrome.

Medical Apartheid : the Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
Harriet A. Washington 174.28WAS
The shameful history of the physical and medical misuse of African Americans began long before the infamous Tuskegee experiment of the 1930s. Washington, a medical journalist, offers the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on and mistreatment of black Americans. Starting with the racist pseudoscience that began when whites first encountered Africans, Washington traces practices from grave robbing to public display of black albinos and the "Hottentot Venus," and theories from eugenics to social Darwinism, which have attempted to justify views of racial hierarchy and mistreatment and even enslavement of blacks. Washington draws on medical journals and previously unpublished reports that openly acknowledged racial attitudes and experimentation, protected by the fact that the public and the media rarely read or understood such reports and often shared similar feelings on the subject. Washington also details a litany of medical abuses and experimentation aimed at black men in the military and in prison, as well as women and children, all without proper notification or consent.

Human Medical Trials
Kelly Barth, book editor 610.72 HUM
Two medical trials came to light in the 1970s that caused the United States medical community to reexamine the way humans are used in such experiments. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the hepatitis study at the Willowbrook School fueled controversy within the medical and political community, raising questions that must still be considered today.

The Plutonium Files : America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War
Eileen Welsome 616.9897WEL
As World War II reached its climax, the U.S. push to create an atomic bomb spawned an industry the size of General Motors almost overnight. But a little-understood human dilemma quickly arose: How was all the radiation involved in building and testing the bomb going to affect the countless researchers, soldiers, and civilians exposed to it? Government scientists scrambled to find out, fearing cancer outbreaks and worse, but in their urgency conducted classified experiments that bordered on the horrific: MIT researchers fed radioactive oatmeal to residents of a state boys' school outside Boston; prisoners in Washington and Oregon were subjected to crippling blasts of direct radiation; and patients with terminal illnesses (or so it was hoped) were secretly injected with large doses of plutonium—survivors were surreptitiously monitored for years afterward.

In the Name of Science : a History of Secret Programs, Medical Research, and Human Experimentation
Andrew Goliszek 619.98GOL
People throughout history have used their fellow human beings for experimentation, most often in the name of military or financial domination. The author, a biology professor at North Carolina A & T State University, says unprecedented medical advances such as the Human Genome Project have put us on the brink of discoveries "that will make real the threat of population control, gene warfare, ethnic cleansing, or worse." The best way to ensure that the past is not repeated, Goliszek argues, is to document the truth about it in all its chilling detail, which he effectively accomplishes here. The book is a compendium of damning evidence that implicates first and foremost our own government, our doctors and corporations, and ultimately ourselves. The book features copious primary documentation, but it doesn't read like an evidentiary record. He introduces readers to the terrifying but intriguing shadow worlds of chemical and biological engineering; CIA mind-control experiments; the American eugenics movement of the past and present; and ethnic weaponry tailored to the genetic specifications of the targeted race. A recurrent theme here is how often experimentation involves subjects who have not consented. The most unsettling chapter gives firsthand accounts by victims of Cold War CIA experiments on children: brainwashing and mind control using chemicals, radiation, hypnosis, electric shock, isolation and physical torture, all reportedly to create the perfect spy-assassin.

The Nicholas Effect : a Boy's Gift to the World
Reg Green 362.1783 GRE
As his vacationing family drove through southern Italy on a summer night in 1994, seven-year-old Nicholas Green, asleep in the back seat, was shot in the head during a botched robbery. The next day his parents made what was for them the "least major decision either of us has ever had to make": to donate Nicholas's organs. What was for them almost an afterthought in their shock and grief had an electrifying effect on Italy and the world. Organ donations were uncommon in Italy prior to Nicholas's death; donor card signings surged afterwards. The Greens' generosity was greeted with an outpouring of sympathy, admiration, and a profound change in the attitude toward organ donation.

Black Markets : the Supply and Demand of Body Parts
Michele Goodwin 362.19GOO
Goodwin exposes the fraud, bias, and commercialism that exists in our supposedly altruistic system of organ donation. The needs and views of African Americans are at the center of this work. lt will cause readers to rethink not only organ donation but the nature of altruism itself.

Donor: How One Girl's Death Gave Life to Others
John Pekkanen 362.795PEK
Medical journalist Pekkanen follows the donation of organs from a young women after her death in an automobile accident. The reader follows the work of Jo Leslie and her staff at the Maryland Organ Procurement Center as they race against time to place two kidneys and two corneas in patients in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Ohio. It is a fascinating story that highlights the anguish and drama of organ donation. The reader gains an understanding of the emotions felt by the families, as well as insight into the politics and barriers faced in organ procurement.

Body of Work : Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab
Christine Montross 611MON
"You begin to learn to heal the living by dismantling the dead," says Montross, and though her recollections encompass all of her medical training, the narrative backbone of the story is her semester-long dissection of a human cadaver, from opening up the ribcage to removing the brain from the skull. Performing her own dissection leads Montross to explore the history of studying anatomy through corpses, which brings tantalizing detours to medieval Italian universities and saints' shrines. But she also recounts her earliest encounters with living patients, such as a heart-wrenching consultation with a man suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease, who can communicate only by blinking.

Stiff : the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Mary Roach 611ROA and BO-CD 611ROA
Roach has written a book as informative and respectful as it is irreverent and witty. From her opening lines ("The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back"), it is clear that she's taking a unique approach to issues surrounding death. Roach delves into the many productive uses to which cadavers have been put, from medical experimentation to applications in transportation safety research (in a chapter archly called "Dead Man Driving") to work by forensic scientists quantifying rates of decay under a wide array of bizarre circumstances. There are also chapters on cannibalism, including an aside on dumplings allegedly filled with human remains from a Chinese crematorium, methods of disposal (burial, cremation, composting) and "beating-heart" cadavers used in organ transplants.