George Wilson, M.D., a radiology resident in Los Angeles, is about to enter a profession on the brink of an enormous paradigm shift, foreshadowing a vastly different role for doctors everywhere. The smartphone is poised to take on a new role in medicine, no longer as a mere medical app but rather as a fully customizable personal physician capable of diagnosing and treating even better than the real thing. It is called iDoc. George's initial collision...

When a medical procedure goes horribly wrong and famous actor Ralph Meier winds up dead, Dr. Marc Schlosser needs to come up with some answers. After all, reputation is everything in this business. Personally, he's not exactly upset that Ralph is gone, but as a high profile doctor to the stars, Marc can't hide from the truth forever. It all started the previous summer. Marc, his wife, and their two beautiful teenage daughters agreed to spend a week...

A magnificent history of the gene and a response to the defining question of the future: What becomes of being human when we learn to “read” and “write” our own genetic information? Siddhartha Mukherjee has a written a biography of the gene as deft, brilliant, and illuminating as his extraordinarily successful biography of cancer. Weaving science, social history, and personal narrative to tell us the story of one of the most important conceptual...

Pia Grazdani is an exceptional yet aloof medical student working closely with Columbia University Medical Center’s premier scientist on cutting edge research that could revolutionize health care by creating replacement organs for critically ill patients. But when tragedy strikes in the lab, Pia, with the help of classmate George Wilson, launches an investigation into the unforeseen calamity in the hospital’s supposedly secure biosafety...

Coming from a farm family of modest income, Quinn Cleary can only go to medical school if she is accepted by The Ingraham, whose program is so exclusive that application is by invitation only and all expenses are absorbed. She is crushed by her rejection but some quick and devious action on the part of her friends gets her enrolled. Quinn finds the education almost too good to be true until she notices subtle changes in her classmates, a common line...

A lavishly funded, security-conscious nanotechnology institute in the foothills of the Rockies, Nano is ahead of the curve in the competitive world of molecular manufacturing, including the construction of microbivores, tiny nanorobots with the ability to gobble up viruses and bacteria.
But when Pia Grazdani takes a job there, she’s shocked by the secretive corporate culture. She’s warned by her boss not to investigate the other work...

For more than 5,000 years, "old" has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, we've made old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, denigrated, neglected, and denied. Reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, noted Harvard-trained geriatrician...

A former paramedic's visceral, poignant, and mordantly funny account of a decade spent on Atlanta's mean streets saving lives and connecting with the drama and occasional beauty that lies inside catastrophe. In the aftermath of 9/11 Kevin Hazzard felt that something was missing from his life — his days were too safe, too routine. A failed salesman turned local reporter, he wanted to test himself, see how he might respond to pressure and danger....

While in a coma following an automobile accident that killed her parents and younger brother, seventeen-year-old Mia, a gifted cellist, weights whether to live with her grief or join her family in death.

The "book of the dead" is the morgue log, a ledger in which all cases are entered by hand. For Kay Scarpetta, however, it is about to take on a new meaning. Fresh from her bruising battle with a psychopath in Florida, Scarpetta decides it's time for a change of pace, not only personally and professionally but geographically. Moving to the historic city of Charleston, South Carolina, she opens a unique private forensic pathology practice, one in which...