Sunday, June 5, 2011
A Fierce Radiance
This book takes place in Manhattan during World War II and follows the development of penicillin with a love story thrown in. Although it is a novel, it is based on historical fact (with some poetic license). I was surprised to learn that blood poisoning was a real threat up until the 1940s - people could die of something as simple as a cat scratch. Fascinating to see how the race to make penicillin readily available to the troops led to the rise of drug companies frantic to patent their own special formulas. Much of the novel takes place at the Rockefeller Institute so especially recommended to Brack and Jesse.
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Thanks for reminding me about this book! I just placed a request for it through our library. It sounds very interesting.
ReplyDeleteVery sadly, at the Teaching Research Ethics workshop I attended a couple weeks ago, I heard quite a lot about some astonishing abuses in the early testing of penicillin. Just last year, a distinguished historian from Wellesley College, Susan Reverby, was going through papers of Assistant Surgeon General John Cutler and discovered descriptions of horrible US-sponsored and funded experiments on prisoners, prostitutes, mentally-retarded children, and soldiers that took place in Guatemala in the late 1940's. Her revelations prompted an apology to the Guatemalan people by Preseident Obama - see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/health/research/02infect.html.
At the time, there were virtually no guidelines for protecting subjects, but it's still hard to imagine that people thought these experiments were OK. In any case, the story underscores your comment about how antibiotics were not in common use at all until quite late.
Just finished - I really enjoyed this, on several levels. It was great fun to read about The Rockefeller Institute, which was well described and very familiar and I liked the focus on biomedical research and photography - two of my chief interests. The love and family relationships were strong and complex - altogether a very emotional and very satisfying book.
ReplyDeleteFinally got around to reading the NYT article above. Ties in with the other book I was reading around the time - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - and the testing of African-Americans without their consent.
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