Angela N. H. Creager is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University. She is the author of The Life of a Virus and coeditor of Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology, and Medicine, both published by the University of Chicago Press. She lives in Princeton, NJ.
Angela N. H. Creager's book is breathtaking in scope, a lucid, original account of how radioisotopes came to suffuse and, in many ways, transform research in fields ranging from the experimental life sciences to biomedicine and ecology. It evenhandedly reveals the close coupling between their exploitation and the dynamics of the Cold War, illuminating how they served at once the purposes of health and security, pressing against the ethical boundaries of research with human subjects while helping to tie together the laboratory and the clinic. In all, a masterful work of historical scholarship. --Daniel J. Kevles, Yale University