Ethics Archives

Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom

From an award-winning journalist, an explosive narrative investigation of the generic drug boom that reveals fraud and life-threatening dangers on a global scale—The Jungle for pharmaceuticals

Many have hailed the widespread use of generic drugs as one of the most important public-health developments of the twenty-first century. Today, almost 90 percent of our pharmaceutical market is comprised of generics, the majority of which are manufactured overseas. […Learn More]

Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life

This “utterly spectacular” book weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author’s life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such innovation possible (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises).

What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That’s the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator. […Learn More]

The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology

The next frontier in technology is inside our own bodies.

Synthetic biology will revolutionize how we define family, how we identify disease and treat aging, where we make our homes, and how we nourish ourselves. This fast-growing field—which uses computers to modify or rewrite genetic code—has created revolutionary, groundbreaking solutions such as the mRNA COVID vaccines, IVF, and lab-grown hamburger that tastes like the real thing. […Learn More]

Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

An insider’s view of science reveals why many scientific results cannot be relied upon – and how the system can be reformed.

Science is how we understand the world. Yet failures in peer review and mistakes in statistics have rendered a shocking number of scientific studies useless – or, worse, badly misleading. Such errors have distorted our knowledge in fields as wide-ranging as medicine, physics, nutrition, education, genetics, economics, and the search for extraterrestrial life. […Learn More]