80 Scientific American, December 2020
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The Organ Thieves: The Shocking
Story of the First Heart Transplant
in the Segregated South
by Chip Jones.
Gallery Books/Jeter Publishing, 2020 ($28)Black Americans receive
inferior health care on all
scores—from general well
ness checks to treatment for
chronic illness, which leads
to worse health outcomes.
They are 60 percent more likely to be diagnosed
than white people with diabetes, for example,
and 40 percent more likely to be diagnosed with
hypertension. The roots of this inequity are
firmly rooted in racism, not race, writer Jones
shows in this gripping book. Examples go back
to the earliest days of the U.S.—he re counts the
legal battles that arose in the 18th century and
later over body snatching from Black grave
yards for medical research. In 1968 doctors ex
tracted, without his consent, the beating heart
of Black factory worker Bruce Tucker for trans
plant into a white businessman, after Tucker
suffered a head injury. Sadly, such disregard for
patients’ rights is not reserved for history.The Janus Point:
A New Theory of Time
by Julian Barbour.
Basic Books, 2020 ($32)
Imagine a cosmos
in which the arrow
of time flies backward.
Mountains rise from
windblown dust.
Decrepit bodies bob
up from graves, becoming youthful before
shrinking to disappear inside a mother’s
womb. Planets, stars and galaxies dissolve
into glowing, dense plasma that pervades
a collapsing universe. In all things, disorder
gives way to order—entropy inexorably
decreases—rather than vice versa, as in
the everyday reality we experience. As far
fetched as all this seems, in The Janus Point,
physicist Barbour argues with poetic erudi
tion for a solution to the vexing problem of
time’s apparent one-way flow: a mirrorlike
temporal duality in which the big bang is not
an explosive cosmic beginning but rather “
a special point on the time line of the universe.”
— Lee Billings
Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds:
Ebola and the Ravages of History
by Paul Farmer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020 ($35)At the end of June the World Health Organization declared that the 10th outbreak
of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo was officially over, after two years and
2,287 deaths. It was the latest severe outbreak and most
likely not the last. In this riveting first-person account of
the even deadlier 2013–2016 outbreak in West Africa,
Farmer, the renowned American physician and founder
of Partners in Health, lays out both an intimate look and
a 10,000foot view of the dire public health situation
there. A history of colonial oppression, exploitation by
mining interests and racism has contributed to civil war
and poverty. Such unrest, he argues, has led to so
called medical deserts, where by disease treatment
is limited and survival rates are tragically low, compared
with richer nations. Arriving in West Africa in the midst of
the outbreak in 2014, Farmer recounts the difficult clinical
circumstances faced by local Ebola treatment units and
weaves in the stories of local doctors and survivors who played a central role in con
fronting the terrible disease.