Telling the story of a clinical trial testing an innovative gel designed to prevent women from contracting HIV, Negotiating Pharmaceutical Uncertainty provides new insight into the complex and contradictory relationship between medical researchers and their subjects. Although clinical trials attempt to control and monitor participants' bodies, Saethre and Stadler argue that the inherent uncertainty of medical testing can create unanticipated opportunities for women to exercise control over their health, sexuality, and social relationships. Combining a critical analysis of the social production of biomedical knowledge and technologies with a detailed ethnography of the lives of female South African trial participants, this book brings to light issues of economic exclusion, racial disparity, and spiritual insecurity in Johannesburg's townships. Built on a series of tales ranging from strategy sessions at the National Institutes of Health to witchcraft accusations against the trial, Negotiating Pharmaceutical Uncertainty illuminates the everyday social lives of clinical trials.

As embedded anthropologists, Saethre and Stadler provide a unique and nuanced perspective of the reality of a clinical trial that is often hidden from view.

A timely philosophical treatment of the current wave of international terrorism and armed conflicts around the world, New Terror, New Wars explores the ethical significance of September 11, and its aftermath. From the nationalistic violence that reigned over the last century, to the amorphous terrors without national boundaries characterizing the opening of this new century, Gilbert leads the way through some of the difficult terrain that has brought the world to these troubling crossroads. He examines the causes of new wars as they are made manifest in the politics of identity, he questions when military force is justified in the pursuit of political goals. He asks whether the "just war" theory is adequate for evaluating and then regulating contemporary conflicts. He deals with the core issues of traditional conflict: self-defense, the conduct of war, hatred and revenge, but also with newer forms, such as conflict in the guise of "humanitarian intervention."

The hopeful conclusion to all wars is, of course, the restoration of peace. Gilbert concludes with a philosophical investigation of not only how to end them, but also how to resolve the conflicts that gave rise to them in the first place and how to produce the conditions in which they are unlikely to occur again—reminding us that the end to a "just war" must be a "just peace" and outlining what the nature of that just peace should be. New Terror, New Wars will be required reading for all those concerned with the ethical issues that inevitably arise from armed conflicts in whatever dire form they may take.

For more than fifty years, we have been waging, but not winning, the war on cancer. We’re better than ever at treating the disease, yet cancer still claims the lives of one in five men and one in six women in the US. The astonishing news is that up to two-thirds of all cancer cases are linked to preventable environmental causes. If we can stop cancer before it begins, why don’t we?

That was the question that motivated Kristina Marusic’s revelatory inquiry into cancer prevention. In searching for answers, she met remarkable doctors, scientists, and advocates who are upending our understanding of cancer and how to fight it. They recognize that we will never reduce cancer rates without ridding our lives of the chemicals that increasingly trigger this deadly disease.

Most never imagined this role for themselves. One scientist grew up without seeing examples of Indian-American women in the field, yet went on to make shocking discoveries about racial disparities in cancer risk. Another leader knew her calling was children’s health, but realized only later in her career that kids can be harmed by invisible pollutants at their daycares. Others uncovered surprising links between cancer and the everyday items that fill our homes and offices.

For these individuals, the fight has become personal. And it certainly is personal for Berry, a young woman whose battle with breast cancer is woven throughout these pages. Might Berry have dodged cancer had she not grown up in Oil City, Pennsylvania, in the shadow of refineries? There is no way to know for sure. But she is certain that, even with the best treatment available, her life was changed irrevocably by her diagnosis. Marusic shows that, collectively, we have the power to prevent many cases like Berry’s. The war on cancer is winnable—if we revolutionize the way we fight.

An engaging account of social reformer Jack Robbins, the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic, and their legacy.

In 1914, social reformer Jack Robbins and a group of adolescent boys in Chicago founded the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic, an unconventional and unusual institution. During a moral panic about delinquent boys, Robbins did not seek to rehabilitate and/or punish wayward youths. Instead, the boys governed themselves, democratically and with compassion for one another, and lived by their mantra “So long as there are boys in trouble, we too are in trouble.” For nearly thirty years, Robbins was their “supervisor,” and the will he drafted in the late 1950s suggests that he continued to care about forgotten boys, even as the political and legal contexts that shaped children’s lives changed dramatically.
 
Nobody’s Boy and His Pals is a lively investigation that challenges our ideas about the history of American childhood and the law. Scouring the archives for traces of the elusive Jack Robbins, Hendrik Hartog examines the legal histories of Progressive reform, childhood, criminality, repression, and free speech. The curiosity of Robbins’s story is compounded by the legal challenges to his will, which wound up establishing the extent to which last wishes must conform to dominant social values. Filled with persistent mysteries and surprising connections, Nobody’s Boy and His Pals illuminates themes of childhood and adolescence, race and ethnicity, sexuality, wealth and poverty, and civil liberties, across the American Century.