PLAYING GOD HAS CONSEQUENCES. Jake Wood has it made. He is a tough homicide detective with a partner who's like a brother, and he's about to marry the girl of his dreams. Then Jake learns a close friend is missing and travels to South America in search of him. After a freak accident in the Amazon Rainforest, Jake wakes up in the hospital--eighteen months later. Long presumed dead, he discovers his fiancée is married and pregnant, his house was sold, his job is gone, and his partner transferred to another city to become lead detective on a serial killer case. Jake buys a cabin in the woods and tries to leave the world behind, until his home is broken into and he discovers he was targeted--but why? When Jake's former partner requests his aid in catching the Blood Eagle Killer, he offers to help find whoever is behind Jake's recent trouble. This leads to Fortech Industries, a pharmaceutical company secretly researching a way to create an immortal gene. Now they intend to destroy their only error--Jake Wood--who has become something more than human.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The story of modern medicine and bioethics—and, indeed, race relations—is refracted beautifully, and movingly.”—Entertainment Weekly NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM HBO® STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE • ONE OF THE “MOST INFLUENTIAL” (CNN), “DEFINING” (LITHUB), AND “BEST” (THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER) BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF ESSENCE’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS • WINNER OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE HEARTLAND PRIZE FOR NONFICTION NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • Entertainment Weekly • O: The Oprah Magazine • NPR • Financial Times • New York • Independent (U.K.) • Times (U.K.) • Publishers Weekly • Library Journal • Kirkus Reviews • Booklist • Globe and Mail Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance? Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

Science need not be dull and bogged down by jargon, as Richard Dawkins proves in this entertaining look at evolution. The themes he takes up are the concepts of altruistic and selfish behaviour; the genetical definition of selfish interest; the evolution of aggressive behaviour; kinshiptheory; sex ratio theory; reciprocal altruism; deceit; and the natural selection of sex differences. 'Should be read, can be read by almost anyone. It describes with great skill a new face of the theory of evolution.' W.D. Hamilton, Science

“I’m something like sixty-thousand years old, and I’ve probably thought more about my own death than any living being has thought about any subject, ever. I used to be unduly preoccupied with what might constitute a “good death”, although interestingly, this has always been an after-the-fact analysis. What I mean is, following a near-death experience, I’ll generally perform a quiet review of the circumstances and judge whether that death would have been objectively good, by whatever metric one uses for that kind of thing. I’m not nearly that self-reflective while in the midst of said near-death experience. Facing death, the predominant thought is always not like this.” A disease threatening the lives of everyone—human and non-human—has been loosed upon the world, by an arch-enemy Adam didn’t even know he had. That’s just the first of his problems. Adam’s also in jail, facing multiple counts of murder, at least a few of which are accurate. He may never see the inside of a courtroom, because there remains a bounty on his head—put there by the aforementioned arch-enemy—that someone is bound to try to collect while he’s stuck behind bars. Meanwhile, Adam’s sitting on some tantalizing evidence that there might be a cure, but to find it, he’s going to have to get out of jail, get out of the country, and track down the man responsible. He can’t do any of that alone, but he also can’t rely on any of his non-human friends for help, not when they’re all getting sick. What he needs is a particularly gifted human, who can do things no other human is capable of. He knows one such person. He calls himself a fixer, and he’s Adam’s—and possibly the world’s—last hope. That’s provided he believes any of it. Immortal: Last Call is the sixth book in the Immortal Novel Series, and also the end of a long journey for one immortal man.

Nearly four decades ago Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, famously reducing humans to “survival machines” whose sole purpose was to preserve “the selfish molecules known as genes.” How these selfish genes work together to construct the organism, however, remained a mystery. Standing atop a wealth of new research, The Society of Genes now provides a vision of how genes cooperate and compete in the struggle for life. Pioneers in the nascent field of systems biology, Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher present a compelling new framework to understand how the human genome evolved and why understanding the interactions among our genes shifts the basic paradigm of modern biology. Contrary to what Dawkins’s popular metaphor seems to imply, the genome is not made of individual genes that focus solely on their own survival. Instead, our genomes comprise a society of genes which, like human societies, is composed of members that form alliances and rivalries. In language accessible to lay readers, The Society of Genes uncovers genetic strategies of cooperation and competition at biological scales ranging from individual cells to entire species. It captures the way the genome works in cancer cells and Neanderthals, in sexual reproduction and the origin of life, always underscoring one critical point: that only by putting the interactions among genes at center stage can we appreciate the logic of life.

From the bestselling author of The Spaceship Next Door: “Very occasionally, I will pop up in the historical record. Most of the time I’m not at all easy to spot, because most of the time I’m just a guy who does a thing and then disappears again into the background behind someone-or-other who’s busy doing something much more important. But there are a couple of rare occasions when I get a starring role.” --Adam the Immortal An oracle has predicted the sojourner’s end, which is a problem for Adam insofar as he has never encountered an oracular prediction that didn’t come true . . . and he is the sojourner. To survive, he’s going to have to figure out what a beautiful ex-government analyst, an eco-terrorist, a rogue FBI agent, and the world’s oldest religious cult all want with him, and fast. And all he wanted when he came to Vegas was to forget about a girl. And maybe have a drink or two. “I am probably not the best source when it comes to who invented what. For a long time I thought I invented the wheel.” --Adam the Immortal The second book in the Immortal series, Hellenic Immortal follows the continuing adventures of Adam, a sixty-thousand-year-old man with a wry sense of humor, a flair for storytelling, and a knack for staying alive. Hellenic Immortal is a clever blend of history, mythology, sci-fi, fantasy, adventure, mystery and romance. A little something, in other words, for every reader.