National
The best books about medical breakthroughs – The Guardian
Amid the rush to find a Covid-19 vaccine, Mark Honigsbaum picks his favourites, including a novel that has inspired generations of medical students and the story of Henrietta Lacks
As medical researchers rush to find a vaccine for Covid-19, the stories of earlier medical breakthroughs offer hope, but also reasons to be cautious about the timescale and effectiveness of any discovery.
In The Vaccine Race, Meredith Waldman describes how in the early 1960s scientists at Philadelphias Wistar Institute began working on a vaccine for rubella (German measles) using a controversial new method: germ-free cells from tissue extracted from an aborted foetus from a woman in Sweden. The…
