Lynn Peirce, a fourth-year medical student at South Carolina’s Mason-Dixon University, thinks she has her life figured out. But when her otherwise healthy boyfriend, Carl, enters the hospital for routine surgery, her neatly ordered life is thrown into total chaos. Carl fails to return to consciousness after the procedure, and an MRI confirms brain death. Devastated by Carl’s condition, Lynn searches for answers. Convinced there’s more to the...

Hazel Sinnett is a medical student in 19th century Scotland who, after being kicked out because of her gender, works with new attractive acquaintance Jack Currer to procure dead bodies to study, but they soon discover secrets buried in the heart of Edinburgh society.

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...

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...

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...

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d...

A man is implicated in a major corporate scandal and vanishes. A suicide? Looking for answers, his wife angers the wrong people. Now, fleeing someone keen to silence her, she unearths shocking secrets about the man she thought she knew.

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.

Present day: Julia Hamill has made a horrifying discovery on the grounds of her new home in rural Massachusetts: a skull buried in the rocky soil--human, female, and, according to the trained eye of Boston medical examiner Maura Isles, scarred with the unmistakable marks of murder. But whoever this nameless woman was, and whatever befell her, is knowledge lost to another time... Boston, 1830: In order to pay for his education, Norris Marshall, a talented...

"When a battered young woman is left for dead, a prisoner in the state penitentiary points out that the attack closely resembles the one for which he was convicted-and which he insists he didn't commit. Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Will Trent enlists the help of his girlfriend, medical examiner Sara Linton, to investigate the new case in light of the older one."