The Age of Cures

From the acclaimed author of Billion Dollar Molecule and The Antidote, a revisionist, passionate history of the pharmaceutical industry, detailing how the nascent industry ushered in an age of cures.

For the past thirty-five years, the acclaimed author Barry Werth has been covering one of the most consequential and underappreciated stories of our time—the rise of pharmaceutical companies, along with the science of drug research and the people who make it all happen. Now he delivers The Age of Cures, a fascinating, in-depth history of the birth of the pharmaceutical industry in the United States, and reveals how that industry created the “miracle drugs” that have saved billions of lives.

In the early part of the 20th century, patients routinely died from the flu, if they didn’t contract a deadlier disease such as rubella, mumps, or polio first. But with advances in technology, the young talent at universities across the country, and the significant investment from a federal government eager to prepare for a second world war, medicine exploded in the 1930s to the 1960s to finally meet the needs of a sick populace. Vitamins, penicillin, wide-spectrum antibiotics, cortisone, a polio vaccine, and cancer chemotherapy revolutionized health care.

Werth brings medicine’s unsung heroes—including Max Tishler, James Conant, George Merck, Alfred Newton Richards, Vannevar Bush, and Selman Waksman—to life in this impassioned and compelling chronicle of the golden age of scientific progress. He also shows us how this crucial investment in science modernized the United States, establishing a scientific powerhouse for decades to come.

A lively work of science history, The Age of Cures is a case study of the values that made American research a model for the world, and a reminder of how society relies on investments in its scientists.