The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
This is a chilling tale about a US research satellite carrying a deadly extraterrestrial microscopic organism that crashes into a small town in Arizona. A group of top scientists are hurriedly assembled in a bid to identify and contain the lethal stowaway.
The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks
by Susan Casey
Susan Casey travels to the Farallon Islands to meet great white sharks and the biologists who study them. Compulsively readable, The Devil's Teeth manages to make the Farallon Islands and the scientists who live there as compelling as the awesome great white sharks who return to those waters year after year.
Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century
By Dorothy Roberts
This book examines how the myth of biological concept of race--revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases--continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly "post-racial" era.
Galápagos
by Kurt Vonnegut
Galápagos takes the reader back one million years, to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galápagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, and totally different human race. In this inimitable novel, America’s master satirist looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry—and all that is worth saving.
The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
It's the summer of 1854, and London is just emerging as one of the first modern cities in the world. But lacking the infrastructure--garbage removal, clean water, sewers--necessary to support its rapidly expanding population, the city has become the perfect breeding ground for a terrifying disease no one knows how to cure. As the cholera outbreak takes hold, a physician and a local curate are spurred to action-and ultimately solve the most pressing medical riddle of their time.
The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus
by Richard Preston
This best-selling 1994 nonfiction thriller by Richard Preston is about the origins and incidents involving viral hemorrhagic fevers, particularly ebola viruses and marburg viruses. The basis of the book was Preston's 1992 New Yorker article "Crisis in the Hot Zone".
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot
An incredibly personal story of a family who discovers the importance of their late mother’s cancer cells to the scientific research community decades after she died of that same cancer. Her biopsy cells were one of the earliest successfully cultured cells, used worldwide to make amazing discoveries, develop drugs to save lives, and make companies immeasurable money while her family languished in poverty. The ethics of using cells from a human without their consent are explored alongside inequities in health care.
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
You've heard of the movie franchise Jurassic Park, but did you know that it was based on a book by
Michael Crichton? As always, the book is even better than the movie! This page-turner takes readers on a wild adventure through Isla Nubla where a wacky billionaire has used science to bring several types of dinosaurs back to life using DNA technology. As you read about how this fictional feat was accomplished and the safeguards put in place to prevent the inevitable, you'll be on the edge of your seat. The only question is: will you root for Mother Nature or Human Hubris!?
Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves
by Frans de Waal
Mama's Last Hug opens with the moving farewell between Mama, a dying chimpanzee matriarch, and her human friend, a professor who inspired the author's work. Their parting, the video of which has been watched by millions online, is not only a window into the deep bonds they shared, but into the remarkable emotional capacities of animals. In this groundbreaking and entertaining book, primatologist Frans de Waal draws on his renowned studies of the social and emotional lives of chimpanzees, bonobos and other primates, and personal encounters with many other species, to illuminate new ideas and findings about animal emotions: joy, grief, shame, love, pain and happiness. Exploring the facial expressions of animals, human and animal politics, and animal consciousness, de Waal illustrates how profoundly we have underestimated animals' emotional experiences. He argues that emotions occupy a far more significant place in the way we organize our societies than a more rationalist approach would advocate. His radical proposal is that emotions are like organs: humans haven't a single organ that other animals don't have, and the same can be said of our emotions.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
by Oliver Sacks
In his most extraordinary book, “one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century” (the New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as developmentally disabled yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr. Sacks’s splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine’s ultimate responsibility: “the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject.”
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
by Harriet A. Washington
Written by bioethicist Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid chronicles the history of medical experimentation on Black Americans.
Natural Obsessions
by Natalie Angier
Natural Obsessions is a book written by American science author Natalie Angier, published in 1988. It chronicles a year in the laboratories of two prominent cancer biologists during a period where there was a race to discover and characterize some of the first cancer-causing and cancer-suppressing genes.
The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness
by Sy Montgomery
Have you ever watched a video of an octopus opening a jar or figuring out how to complete a complex task? Have you ever wondered about their amazing color-changing capabilities? They almost seem more alien than of this world. In The Soul of an Octopus, Sy Montgomery explores these eight-legged creatures in a book that is easy to read, funny, entertaining, and touching. A number of the stars in the book live in the New England Aquarium, so there is a local aspect as well.
Superior: The Return of Race Science
Angela Saini
Superior tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science.
Survival of the Sickest: The Surprising Connections Between Disease and Longevity
by Dr. Sharon Moalem
Survival of the Sickest is a 2007 New York Times best-selling science book by Sharon Moalem, an evolutionary biologist and neurogeneticist, and Jonathan Prince, senior advisor and speechwriter for the Clinton administration.
Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe
by Jane Goodall
Equipped with little more than a notebook, binoculars, and her fascination with wildlife, Jane braved a realm of unknowns to give the world a remarkable window into humankind's closest living relatives. On the shores of Lake Tanganyika, Gombe is a community where the principal residents are chimpanzees. Through Goodall's eyes we watch as the younger chimpanzees vie for power, and how the leaders must deal with this challenge. We learn how one mother successfully rears her children, whilst another appears to doom her offspring to failure. All life is here—glorious births and heart-breaking deaths, moments of brutality, alongside the most tender displays of affection. In this book, as Jane Goodall reveals the story of this intimately intertwined community, we are shown the parallels with human emotions laid bare. Indeed, in the mirror of chimpanzee life, we see ourselves reflected.
The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code
by Sam Kean
Did the human race almost go extinct? Can genetics explain a cat lady's love for felines? How does DNA lead to people with no fingerprints or humans born with tails? And how did the right combination of genes create the exceptionally flexible thumbs and fingers of a truly singular violinist? Unraveling the genetic code hasn't always been easy - from its earliest days, genetics has been rife with infighting, backstabbing and controversial theories - but scientists can now finally read the astounding stories inscribed in our DNA. As we make advances into DNA mapping and modification, genetics will continue to be the hottest topic in science, shaping the very make-up of our bodies and the world around us. With a masterful combination of science, history and culture, Sam Kean untangles the secrets of our genetic code, explaining how genetics has shaped our past and how DNA will determine humankind's future.
Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers
by Robert Sapolsky
By Stanford University biologist Robert M. Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers explains how social phenomena such as child abuse and the chronic stress of poverty affect biological stress, leading to increased risk of disease and disability.
Something The Lord Made
Film based on the true story of Vivien Thomas, an American laboratory supervisor who developed a procedure used to treat blue baby syndrome in the 1940s but was not given credit for many years because of systemic racism within the field.
Temple Grandin
An amazing story of an influential woman with autism. The acting is incredible and the story inspiring. It will change the way you think about people who think and act differently than you.
Inside Out
Growing up can be a bumpy road, and it's no exception for Riley, who is uprooted from her Midwest life when her father starts a new job in San Francisco. Like all of us, Riley is guided by her emotions - Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness. The emotions live in Headquarters, the control center inside Riley's mind, where they help advise her through everyday life. As Riley and her emotions struggle to adjust to a new life in San Francisco, turmoil ensues in Headquarters. Although Joy, Riley's main and most important emotion, tries to keep things positive, the emotions conflict on how best to navigate a new city, house and school. Source: rottentomatoes.com
Fantastic Voyage
The brilliant scientist Jan Benes (Jean Del Val) develops a way to shrink humans, and other objects, for brief periods of time. Benes, who is working in communist Russia, is transported by the CIA to America, but is attacked en route. In order to save the scientist, who has developed a blood clot in his brain, a team of Americans in a nuclear submarine is shrunk and injected into Benes' body. They have a finite period of time to fix the clot and get out before the miniaturization wears off. Source: wikipedia.com
Gravity
Dr. Ryan Stone is a medical engineer on her first shuttle mission. Her commander is veteran astronaut Matt Kowalsky, helming his last flight before retirement. Then, during a routine space walk by the pair, disaster strikes: The shuttle is destroyed, leaving Ryan and Matt stranded in deep space with no link to Earth and no hope of rescue. As fear turns to panic, they realize that the only way home may be to venture further into space.
Gattaca
Vincent Freeman has always fantasized about traveling into outer space, but is grounded by his status as a genetically inferior "in-valid." He decides to fight his fate by purchasing the genes of Jerome Morrow, a laboratory-engineered "valid." He assumes Jerome's DNA identity and joins the Gattaca space program, where he falls in love with Irene. An investigation into the death of a Gattaca officer complicates Vincent's plans. Source: wikipedia.com
The Race for the Double Helix
Based on a true story, this film focuses on the quest to discover the building blocks of DNA. American scientist Jim Watson joins forces with his English counterpart, Francis Crick, and together they strive to outdo their brilliant contemporaries as they make progress towards unlocking DNA's double-helix structure. The movie captures the personalities and tenacious attitudes of the researchers, particularly Watson and his considerable eccentricities. Source: wikipedia.com
The Biggest Little Farm
A couple are followed through their successes and failures as they work to develop a sustainable farm on 200 acres outside of Los Angeles. Over the years, the desolate land they purchase begins to thrive. Source: wikipedia.com
The Martian
During a manned mission to Mars, Astronaut Mark Watney is presumed dead after a fierce storm and left behind by his crew. But Watney has survived and finds himself stranded and alone on the hostile planet. With only meager supplies, he must draw upon his ingenuity, wit and spirit to subsist and find a way to signal to Earth that he is alive. Millions of miles away, NASA and a team of international scientists work tirelessly to bring "the Martian" home, while his crewmates concurrently plot a daring, if not impossible, rescue mission. As these stories of incredible bravery unfold, the world comes together to root for Watney's safe return. Watch it and then ask yourself: What in the film was actually feasible or realistic? What wasn’t?