In New Orleans, the widow of an attorney who died of lung cancer vowed to avenge his death by suing the tobacco companies. In Clarksdale, Mississippi, an outraged country lawyer discovered the cost of lung cancer care as his secretary's mother lay dying. In Washington, D.C., a young pediatrician became the first FDA administrator in ninety years to decide nicotine should be regulated as a drug. All three were warned: Don't mess with Big Tobacco. Then a $9-an-hour law clerk in Louisville, Kentucky, stole thousands of incriminating tobacco company documents. Suddenly, an untouchable industry was under siege. In the vanguard of the attack were the nation's toughest liability lawyers. Thirty-nine states would ultimately join the battle, seeking billions of Midicaid dollars spent on tobacco-related diseases. The costliest civil litigation in history had begun. The $50 billion tobacco industry had finally met its match. Motivated as much by anger as by greed, liability...

In 1943, Albert Schatz, a young Rutgers College Ph.D. student, worked on a wartime project in microbiology professor Selman Waksman's lab, searching for an antibiotic to fight infections on the front lines and at home. In his eleventh experiment on a common bacterium found in farmyard soil, Schatz discovered streptomycin, the first effective cure for tuberculosis, one of the world's deadliest diseases.As director of Schatz's research, Waksman took credit for the discovery, belittled Schatz's work, and secretly enriched himself with royalties from the streptomycin patent filed by the pharmaceutical company Merck. In an unprecedented lawsuit, young Schatz sued Waksman, and was awarded the title of "co-discoverer" and a share of the royalties. But two years later, Professor Waksman alone was awarded the Nobel Prize. Schatz disappeared into academic obscurity.For the first time, acclaimed author and journalist Peter Pringle unravels the intrigues behind one of the most...