Beloved, best-selling science writer Mary Roach's "acutely entertaining, morbidly fascinating" (Susan Adams, Forbes) classic, now with a new epilogue.

For two thousand years, cadavers – some willingly, some unwittingly – have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They've tested France's first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to

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Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to in vitro...

A finely tuned parody of the old Frankenstein movies, in which Wilder returns to the old country to clear his family name.

When scientists find a way to shrink humans to five inches tall, Paul Safrane and his wife Audrey decide to ditch their stressed out lives in order to get small and live large in a luxurious downsized community. Filled with life-changing adventures and endless possibilities, Leisureland offers more than riches, as Paul discovers a whole new world and realizes that we are meant for something bigger.

A brilliant geneticist, whose last years of research were shrouded in secrecy, leaves a legacy that affects the lives of a strangely diverse group of people.

The great viral plague had left a small group of survivors clinging to life amidst a world transformed into a nightmare. Led by the mysterious, charismatic Amy, they go on the attack, leading an insurrection against the virals--the first offensives of the Second Viral War--infiltrating a dozen hives, each presided over by one of the original Twelve. Their secret weapon: Alicia, transformed at the end of book one into a half human, half viral--but...

"Knowing their lives are at stake, Shay and Odin Remby race to stay one step ahead of Singular Corp in their efforts to expose the company's secret and highly unethical experiments"-- The Singular Corporation has been experimenting on a girl, trying to implant a U.S. senator's memories into her brain-- with partial success. Fenfang is now a girl who literally knows too much. When Shay and Odin Remby liberate the girl, they hope to expose the company's...

"When Cara and Brendan first meet, she's fresh out of college with a degree in the fine arts, recovering from the recent death of her mother and spending time on Martha's Vineyard while trying to figure out her next steps. She's swept away by Brendan's humor and charm and intoxicated by his thrilling, dangerous secret. He claims--no, he insists--that he he can breathe underwater. He shows Cara his gills. He dives beneath the waves and doesn't emerge...

"Awakening in a bleak landscape as scarred as her body, Cass Dollar vaguely recalls surviving something terrible. Having no idea how many weeks have passed, she slowly realizes the horrifying truth: Ruthie has vanished. And with her, nearly all of civilization. Where once-lush hills carried cars and commerce, the roads today see only cannibalistic Beaters--people turned hungry for human flesh by a government experiment gone wrong. In a broken, barren...

The first comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between Africans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the way both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without a hint of informed consent--a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and...