Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, by James Jones, is a chronicle of the appalling cruelty that turned people into "subjects" for the sake of science. The men in the study were told that they had "bad blood''—but the "treatment'' they received was only aspirin and iron tonic. The PHS worked with local...
Tag - book review
Yet, there are some vital omissions. Notwithstanding the brave talk in the preface— "The book is mainly a discussion of how intimidation, myth, misunderstanding, and missed opportunities have affected a large proportion of the population" (p. 14)--the book settles into more of a psychological analysis of the problem...
Microelectronics does not embrace the simple solution of dropping resistance to new technologies; instead it outlines other ways workers can preserved integrity. Aside from demanding higher wages and refusing job loss and job force shrinkage, workers can demand input into the design process itself when new...
The nine sessions of the conference were each devoted to one topic. Following the format of the conference, the two volumes are divided into nine sections, each of which consists of short formal papers, responses to those papers and discussions. The first volume, Birth Control and Controlling Birth, covers the...
The Politics of Cancer is his contribution to the debate over the future of the environmental health movement. In it he has pulled together a monumental amount of information on specific carcinogens, on the scientific background to cancer, and on the “scientific” and “non-scientific” opposition to regulation. He...
Death on the Job is a relatively short (196 pages) reference for workers, health professionals, and lay advocates, summarizing what everyone — industry, government, unions — is doing about occupational health and why. Berman's original research and radical perspective combine to make this a valuable work for those of...
Overall, Brian Martin's book provides a valuable tool for demonstrating how scientific work is tied up in social and political forces. The book should be of particular value in academic courses which deal with the nature of the scientific process and I hope it will serve as a model for analyses of topics such as...
Marx generally argued that the demands of capitalist production would create increasing antagonism between workers and managers, culminating in the rupture of existing social controls. The fact that this rupture has not happened has led Marxists to question how capitalist control is actually maintained in the...
The Food and Nutrition Group of the Boston chapter of Science for the People has revised our alternative curriculum for high school students entitled Feed. Need. Greed (first written in 1974). Our goal is to raise the awareness of students and teachers to the "why's" of food production, to the effects of diet on...
Statements like: "the 'superbug' that last year destroyed $45 million worth of cotton is now attacking the nation's 42,000-acre supply of winter lettuce, destroying 10% to 20% of the early plantings'' and "It's threatening maybe 50% of the crop and if we don't get some kind of control, lettuce could go up to $2 a head"