An engaging, provocative study of a much-hyped aspect of American health care.
A history and debunking of the health sciences’ embrace of precision medicine rooted in genetics.
Tabery, a professor of philosophy and health ethics, argues that the role of genetic research in a fundamental transformation of health care in America was not inevitable. In fact, he suggests, its promise of tailored medicine was not even all that revolutionary, and its current achievements are mostly exaggerated. To make his point, the author investigates the Human Genome Project and the scientists involved as they edged out the opposing environmental approach embodied in the National Children’s Study that fought—unsuccessfully—for more than a decade to offer an alternative data set. In an accessible narrative bolstered by prodigious research, Tabery reveals that victory for genomics was less about hard science and more about business interests, media fascination, and political leverage. The author admits his own belief in the superiority of the environmental approach, its attention to the social determinants of health, and its emphasis on prevention. However, Tabery does more to poke holes in the genetic approach than to validate the effectiveness of the environmental one, and comprehensive, detailed backstories are occasionally digressive and detract from the author’s primary argument. Still, even these details and the way they connect various scientific innovations serve to underscore concerns about how biological information is used, how quickly private industry and political interests can undermine the scientific community, and how cavalierly genetic medicine can play with patient expectations. Tabery succeeds in raising a compelling alarm about where things stand and making clear that the current situation could have been much different, all while laying the groundwork for an alternative future that better solves the disparities that personalized medicine has ignored—and, in some cases, exacerbated. The debates will continue, but the author provides a solid resource within that debate.
An engaging, provocative study of a much-hyped aspect of American health care.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9780525658207
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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