Community Description

The book club last read ‘Empire of Pain’ by Pattrick Reddan Keefe. The book chronicles a well known and tragic story of opioid development, marketing, regulatory approval and disaster in the US.  However, years of litigation and interviews have now brought more of the story out into the public.

We had a great discussion – even considering what our responsibility is as organizations in the Health Research space to protect patients.

We are now surveying the members as to which of these 5 books we will be discussing this summer. Hope you can join us!

The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times (254 pages)
By Jane Goodall, Douglas Abrams, Gail Hudson

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (660 pages)
By Randy Shilts

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (464 pages) (This is always on Obama’s top book list)
By Yuval Noah Harari

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women (476 pages)
By Kate Moore

The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor’s Heroic Search for the World’s First Miracle Drug (352 pages)
By Thomas Hager

Previous books this group considered:

• A crack in creation (about CRISPR) by Jennifer Doudna*
• Almost Everything: Notes on Hope by Anne Lamott
• Bad Blood – Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by David Carreyrou
• Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
• Brain on Fire by Susannah Callahan
• Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
• Dopesick by Beth Macy . The opioid epidemic, in detail.
• Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar’s Search for Justice by Alice Dreger
• Jonas Salk, A Life by Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs
• Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Open Wound by Jason Karlawish
• Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chavalier*
• The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
• The Biological Mind by Alan Jasanoff
• The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
• The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last by Azra Raza
• The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee
• The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
• The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry*
• The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson
• The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells
• The Overstory by Richard Powers
• The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience by Lee McIntyre
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay
• Transcendent Kingdom*
• Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel*

*denotes previous Book Club selections