You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation

by Paul A. Offit MD Narrated by James Noel Hoban

Overview

One of America's top physicians traces the history of risk in medicine-with powerful lessons for today
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Every medical decision-whether to have chemotherapy, an X-ray, or surgery-is a risk, no matter which way you choose. In You Bet Your Life, physician Paul A. Offit argues that, from the first blood transfusions four hundred years ago to the hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine, risk has been essential to the discovery of new treatments. More importantly, understanding the risks is crucial to whether, as a society or as individuals, we accept them.
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Told in Offit's vigorous and rigorous style, You Bet Your Life is an entertaining history of medicine. But it also lays bare the tortured relationships between intellectual breakthroughs, political realities, and human foibles. Our pandemic year has shown us, with its debates over lockdowns, masks, and vaccines, how easy it is to get everything wrong. You Bet Your Life is an essential read for getting the future a bit more right.

Editorial Reviews

NOVEMBER 2021 - AudioFile

Advances in medicine rarely go in a straight line. There are breakthroughs, setbacks, progress, failures, risk-benefit analyses, and real human (and animal) costs. James Noel Hoban’s deep, grave voice and energetic pace embody the sense of urgency that is central to efforts to save patients’ lives. In 1967, the recipient of a heart transplant operation lived for 18 days; now such operations are somewhat routine, and life is extended for decades. Ryan White famously contracted HIV/AIDS from a blood transfusion and bravely fought prejudice to attend school; oversight now ensures a safe blood supply. Hoban sounds fascinated by Dr. Paul Offit’s stories of medical progress, and he adjusts his performance nicely to reflect both the tragedy and excitement of the scientific process. A.B. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

08/23/2021

Offit (Overkill), director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, explores nine major medical advances in this impressive look at history and technology. “Virtually every medical breakthrough has exacted a human price,” he writes, and aims to prove that no medical innovations are risk-free. The nine advances he focuses on—transplants, blood transfusions, anesthesia, biologics, antibiotics, vaccines, X-rays, chemotherapy, and genetic engineering—have all “been accompanied by tragedy,” and a look back at these lessons, he argues, can prevent them from being repeated. Offit first covers transplants, outlining how, in the mid-1960s, dozens of people died in attempted animal-to-human heart transplants, and early blood transfusions were similarly dangerous up until the 1900s, when blood typing began. All the men involved in early anesthesia trials “met unfortunate ends,” and public opinion of biologicals was tainted when a tainted tetanus antiserum killed patients. The way Offit tells the story of each medical advance is fascinating, packed with case studies and characters, including groundbreaking scientists and near-death patients. Ultimately, Offit writes, there’s risk associated with all new developments—“We can’t wait until we know everything, because we never know everything.” This thorough survey is as entertaining as it is informative. (Sept.)

From the Publisher

Dr. Offit, a pediatrician, vaccine expert and prolific author, is exquisitely attuned to the burden shouldered by the earliest recipients of medical treatments and technologies.”
 —Wall Street Journal

“Offit is a good storyteller, and he has some terrific stories to tell.”
 —Cass R. Sunstein, The New York Times Book Review

“In You Bet Your Life, Offit elucidates, using compelling case studies, how we come to know what we know in science and medicine: through a mix of imagination, experimentation, successes, misses and tragedies. It's a riveting story of what is possible when confidence and humility meet, and what seems inevitable when hubris dominates. Illuminating the Covid-19 pandemic and how we got to safe and effective vaccines so quickly, it is also a timeless read for anyone interested in science, ethics, discovery and how we can better prevent the next pandemic.”—Chelsea Clinton, vice chair of the Clinton Foundation

“Riveting and filled with fascinating details…His latest book—YOU BET YOUR LIFE— couldn’t be more timely.”
 —Nature

“Offit is a fluid storyteller armed with decades of knowledge, and he provides an educative…reading experience.”—Kirkus

“The way Offit tells the story of each medical advance is fascinating...this thorough survey is as entertaining as it is informative.”
 —Publishers Weekly

“A well-written and informative look at the reality of medical advancement, including poignant examples of its often-fatal repercussions.” 
 —Library Journal

"What makes Paul Offit so special, beyond his extraordinary talents as a physician, vaccine-developer, and children’s advocate, is his ability to bring complicated scientific subjects to life. You Bet Your Life is the latest example—a thoughtful, beautifully written account of the risks and rewards of medical technology told through the eyes of the inventors and their patients.  Tragedy is an inevitable part of the process; breakthroughs come at a human cost, even those that have saved untold millions of lives.  To read this elegant book is grasp these ethical complexities—with a masterful medical writer as our guide."—David Oshinsky, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History for Polio: An American Story

"Paul Offit is a national treasure.  He has emerged from the ranks of doctors and scientists as one of the world’s most effective communicators.  In You Bet Your Life he astutely tracks the development of a variety of monumental medical breakthroughs constantly reminding us that each carried with it not only predictable and unpredictable risks but terrible failures.  It is a hard message that most of us, in thinking about the price of biomedical progress, do not want to hear.  But post a horrific pandemic where blunders abounded and unnecessary deaths occurred at a staggering rate, we had better heed his clear message that acknowledging and managing risk, not pretending it does not exist or simply ignoring the truth, is the key to a healthier future for you, your children and their descendants."

 —Arthur Caplan, Mitty Professor of Bioethics, NYU Grossman School of Medicine

"This book is exquisitely timed for a moment in which biomedicine has delivered miraculous vaccines to a public disastrously skeptical of science. In a series of vignettes including botched polio vaccines and the first death in a gene therapy treatment, Offit shows that while science must maintain its humility in the face of complexity, the public can’t afford to lose its trust in medical science despite the inevitable tragedies that occur in pursuit of progress."—Arthur Allen, author of Vaccine

Library Journal

08/01/2021

Offit is an American pediatrician, a nationally renowned virology and immunology expert, and a prolific consumer health book author (Overkill: When Modern Medicine Goes Too Far). His new title comes in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, during which Offit has served on the FDA's vaccination advisory committee and on a similar committee for the NIH. He reflects on the highly unusual and unique factors in the development of fast-tracked COVID-19 vaccines, which he contextualizes with nine historical medical advances. He describes the earliest research and experiments with vaccination (starting in the late 1800s) and addresses racial and disability injustice in both historical and modern medicine. In an epilogue titled "Living with Uncertainty," Offit highlights seven themes that affect current vaccine decisions, regarding the level of risk individuals and society are willing to undertake to make medical progress. He acknowledges the existence of uncertainty and the risks required for the work of medical explorers of the modern age, along with the near inevitability of such risk. Offit illustrates his points with relevant examples from the development of COVID-19 vaccines. VERDICT A well-written and informative look at the reality of medical advancement, including poignant examples of its often-fatal repercussions.—Elizabeth J. Eastwood, Los Alamos, NM

NOVEMBER 2021 - AudioFile

Advances in medicine rarely go in a straight line. There are breakthroughs, setbacks, progress, failures, risk-benefit analyses, and real human (and animal) costs. James Noel Hoban’s deep, grave voice and energetic pace embody the sense of urgency that is central to efforts to save patients’ lives. In 1967, the recipient of a heart transplant operation lived for 18 days; now such operations are somewhat routine, and life is extended for decades. Ryan White famously contracted HIV/AIDS from a blood transfusion and bravely fought prejudice to attend school; oversight now ensures a safe blood supply. Hoban sounds fascinated by Dr. Paul Offit’s stories of medical progress, and he adjusts his performance nicely to reflect both the tragedy and excitement of the scientific process. A.B. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2021-07-18
How the medical advances we take for granted came to be—and it’s not a pretty picture.

Offit, a professor of pediatrics and vaccinology, specializes in denouncing bad doctors and popular health nonsense. In his latest, he switches gears and follows the history of medical innovation. Though we are “at the dawn of a wondrous age,” he writes, there’s a “catch…virtually every medical breakthrough has exacted a human price.” He illustrates with gripping, often gruesome stories of the early years of lifesaving treatments plus other medical stories that are merely horrific. In 1967, South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard became a worldwide celebrity by transplanting the first human heart. Surgeons around the world rushed to follow suit, with terrible results. In 1968, only 10% of recipients lived for two years, a number that worsened the following year; by 1971, most hospitals had closed their transplant units. The story ends happily as more judicious surgeons refined their techniques, and heart transplants are now as routine as bypass surgery. Offit then chronicles other medical success stories with rough beginnings—e.g., a 1920 professional gathering of radiologists 20 years after X-rays became an essential medical tool: “So many attendees were missing hands and fingers that when the chicken dinner was served no one could cut their meat.” Every child with acute lymphoblastic leukemia died before the first treatment appeared in 1947. Most improved with the first chemotherapy but “eventually relapsed and died.” Today, drugs cure 90% of those cases, but many tragedies happened along the way. Offit also tells the sad story of Ryan White, a hemophiliac who, in 1984, was infected with AIDS via a blood transfusion. Although doctors agreed that no one could catch his disease, ignorant neighbors and school officials treated him heartlessly. Certainly, the maxim that no one should know how sausages are made applies here, but Offit is a fluid storyteller armed with decades of knowledge, and he provides an educative, though often distressing, reading experience.

Unsettling but realistic medical histories.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177205243
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	09/21/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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