The emergence of ketamine—previously known as a combat anesthetic and club drug—as a treatment for depression. Ketamine, approved in 2019 by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of depression, has been touted by scientists and media reports as something approaching a miracle cure. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series chronicles the ascent of a drug that h…
What does the birth of babies whose embryos have gone through genome editing mean—for science and for all of us? In November 2018, the world was shocked to learn that two babies had been born in China with DNA edited while they were embryos—as dramatic a development in genetics as the 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep. In this book, Hank Greely, a leading authority on law and genetics, tel…
How viruses emerge to cause pandemics, how our immune system combats them, and how diagnostic tests, vaccines, and antiviral therapies work. Throughout history, humans have contended with pandemics. History is replete with references to plagues, pestilence, and contagion, but the devastation wrought by pandemics had been largely forgotten by the twenty-first century. Now, the enormous human …
A reconceptualization of origins research that exploits a modern understanding of non-covalent molecular forces that stabilize living prokaryotic cells. Scientific research into the origins of life remains exploratory and speculative. Science has no definitive answer to the biggest questions—“What is life?” and “How did life begin on earth?” In this book, Jan Spitzer reconceptualiz…
A physician-anthropologist explores how public health practices—from epidemiological modeling to outbreak containment—help perpetuate global inequities. In Epidemic Illusions, Eugene Richardson, a physician and an anthropologist, contends that public health practices—from epidemiological modeling and outbreak containment to Big Data and causal inference—play an essential role in perp…
How food industry lobbyists and a small group of scientists have successfully fought government efforts to reduce dangerous levels of sodium in our food. A high-sodium diet is deadly; studies have linked it to high blood pressure, strokes, and heart attacks. It's been estimated that excess sodium in the American diet causes as many as 100,000 deaths and many billions of dollars in avoidable …
From science advocate and March on Science National Co-Chair Jonathan M. Berman, an essential takedown of the anti-vaccination movement, from its nineteenth-century antecedents to today's Facebook activists, offering strategies for refuting false claims of friends and family. Vaccines are a documented success story, one of the most successful public health interventions in history. Yet there…
Experts discuss the potential of early intervention to transform outcomes for people with mental disorders. Mental illness represents one of the largest disease burdens worldwide, yet treatments have been largely ineffective in improving the quality of life for millions of affected individuals—in part because approaches taken have focused on late-stage disorders in adulthood. This volume s…
How biases, the desire for a good narrative, reliance on citation metrics, and other problems undermine confidence in modern science. Modern science is built on experimental evidence, yet scientists are often very selective in deciding what evidence to use and tend to disagree about how to interpret it. In The Matter of Facts, Gareth and Rhodri Leng explore how scientists produce and use evi…
The development, manufacturing, and use of contraceptive methods from the late nineteenth century to the present, viewed from the perspective of reproductive justice. The beginning of the modern contraceptive era began in 1882, when Dr. Aletta Jacobs opened the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The founding of this facility, and the clinical provision of contraception that it enabled,…