The Icepick Surgeon

"[The author] tells the true story of what happens when unfettered ambition pushes otherwise rational men and women to cross the line in the name of science, trampling ethical boundaries and often committing crimes in the process. [This book] . . . guides the reader across two thousand years of history, beginning with Cleopatra's dark deeds in ancient Egypt. The book reveals the origins of much of modern science in the transatlantic slave trade of the 1700s, as well as Thomas Edison's mercenary support of the electric chair and the warped logic of the spies who infiltrated the Manhattan Project. But the sins of science aren't all safely buried in the past. Many of them, [the author] reminds us, still affect us. We can draw direct lines from the medical abuses of Tuskegee and Nazi Germany to . . . vaccine hesitancy, and connect icepick lobotomies from the 1950s to the contemporary failings of mental-health care"--Provided by publisher.