He told them he was testing their immune systems; he said nothing about injecting them with someone else’s malignant cells.

Science is an inherently optimistic enterprise, the working assumption being that nature is comprehensible; mysteries can be solved; we can make things better.

A physician violates his duty to his patient and subjects himself to liability if he withholds any facts which are necessary to form the basis of an intelligent consent by the patient to the proposed treatment.” He wrote that there needed to be “full disclosure of facts necessary to an informed consent.

Nader’s data could not have been clearer, or more unsettling. He demonstrated that the very act of remembering something makes it vulnerable to change. Like a text recalled from a computer’s hard drive, each memory was subject to editing. First you have to search the computer for the the text and then bring it to the screen, at which point you can alter it and save it. Whether the changes are slight or extensive, the new document is never quite the same as the original.

When I saw those toenails,” Mary told me years later, “I nearly fainted. I thought, Oh jeez, she’s a real person. I started imagining her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we’d been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman. I’d never thought of it that way.

We have room to act and shape our stories – although as we get older, we do so within narrower and narrower confines.

My wife is a fire dragon without morning coffee,′ he said. ‘I better go make some.’ It was two in the afternoon.

But when he instructed his staff to give the injections without telling patients they contained cancer cells, three young Jewish doctors refused, saying they wouldn’t conduct research on patients without their consent. All three knew about the research Nazis had done on Jewish prisoners. They also knew about the famous Nuremberg Trials.

Lefkowitz wrote, “Every human being has an inalienable right to determine what shall be done with his own body.

You don’t have to spend much time with the elderly or those with terminal illness to see how often medicine fails the people it is supposed to help. The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver’s chance of benefit. These days are spent in institutions – nursing homes and intensive-care units – where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life.