Health & Medicine

Film critic David Edelstein reviews the new film 28 Days Later. The movie is based on the best-selling novel The Beach, in which animal-rights activists break into a lab and free infected monkeys, letting loose a virus that puts people into a permanent state of murderous rage.

He has written his first novel for adults, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The narrator of the story is an autistic teenager who is obsessed with Sherlock Holmes and who must prove his innocence when a neighborhood dog is killed. One reviewer described it as "wonderful, simple, moving, and likely to be a smash." Haddon lives in England and teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and for Oxford University.

He's a longtime correspondent on health and science policy for The New York Times. In his new book, Protecting America's Health: the FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation, he chronicles the history of the Food and Drug Administration from its start during the administration of Teddy Roosevelt. Hilts also broke the now-famous story of the Brown and Williamson tobacco industry papers, and is the author of Smoke Screen: The Truth Behind the Tobacco Industry Cover-Up.

He is an expert on the mental health issues of military personnel and their families. He was a senior social worker in the first Gulf war counseling soldiers before and after battle. Martin has written extensively on these matters and teaches in the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research at Bryn Mawr College outside of Philadelphia.

The United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa talks about the current state of the AIDS crisis there. He recently returned from a tour of Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia, where he was investigating links between hunger and AIDS. He is the former Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF and was the Canadian ambassador to the U.N. from 1984-1988.

He is the executive director of Senior Action Network, a grassroots organization dedicated to improving the lives of seniors in the San Francisco area. He led the opposition to the Segway in San Francisco, which has become the first city to ban the Segway from sidewalks.

He is professor of psychiatry and psychology at the Graduate School University Center and director of The Center on Violence and Human Survival at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at The City University of New York. He has written books on many topics, including a Japanese cult that released poison gas in the Tokyo subways, Nazi doctors, Hiroshima survivors and Vietnam vets. He will discuss the emotional impact of the Columbia shuttle disaster, as well as the impact of an impending war in Iraq, and the looming nuclear crisis in North Korea.

Art Caplan is the director of the Center for Bioethics, and chief of the Division of Bioethics, at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center. Sherry Glied is the chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

Terry Gross speaks with Chris Butler, chief marketing officer for Independence Blue Cross of Southeastern Pennsylvania. The insurer is set to raise its rates as much as 50 percent. Butler will give is a sense of the healthcare industry's viewpoint on rising costs and changes in policy.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Marriage: A Duet. It's a book of two novellas by Anne Taylor Fleming.

She died last month at the age of 39. As a child, Grealy spent five years being treated for cancer, which left her face disfigured. She had over 30 reconstructive procedures and years of living with a distorted self-image. She wrote Autobiography of a Face in 1994, her memoir about coming to terms with looking less than perfect in a society that values female beauty. No cause of death was announced, but friends indicated she was despondent of late. Her last book was As Seen on TV, published in 2000.

Doctors Quentin Young and Marcia Angell of Physicians for a National Health Care Program (PNHP). They advocate a single-payer health insurance plan, in which the government finances health care, but choice of provider remains mostly private. Young is Senior Attending Physician at Michael Reese Hospital and serves as National Coordinator of PNHP. Angell is head of the Physician Working Group and is a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Economist Karen Davis, president of The Commonwealth Fund. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine's panel studying ways to improve health care. She supports improving on existing plans such as Medicare and employer coverage. She served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health Policy in the Department of Health and Human Services from 1977-80 and was the first woman to head a U.S. Public Health Service Agency.

Bruce McEwen is a pioneering expert on the ways in which the brain influences the body. He is the author of ""The End of Stress As We Know It" (with Elizabeth Norton Lasley, published by Joseph Henry Press). The book examines the response of the body to stress, what happens when the body's stress response turns against us, and how to keep that from happening. Dr. McEwen is head of the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at Rockefeller University in New York City.

In her new guide to the evolutionary biology of sex, Judson explores the sex lives of animals and insects. Posing as Dr. Tatiana, sex-advice columnist, she answers "letters" posted by such creatures as the fairy wren, the stalk-eyed fly and the African elephant. Her new book is Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation. Judson has also written for The Economist, Nature and Science. This interview first aired Aug. 13, 2002.

Reeve died Sunday of heart failure at the age of 52. He was best known for starring in the Superman film series. A 1995 horseback riding accident left him paralyzed from the neck down. After the accident, he became a worldwide advocate for spinal cord research. This interview was originally broadcast on Sept. 30, 2002.

New York-based writer Paul Auster is the author of 10 novels. His latest is The Book of Illusions. For a year beginning in October 1999, Auster gathered stories sent to him by men and women across the United States. The stories were all true, short and personal. As part of NPR's National Story Project, Auster read them over the air. Those stories were collected in the book, I Thought My Father Was God. Auster also wrote the screenplays for Smoke and Blue in the Face.

Evolutionary biologist and journalist Olivia Judson. In her new guide to the evolutionary biology of sex, Judson, explores the sex lives of animals and insects. Posing as Dr Tatiana, sex-advice columnist, she answers 'letters' posted by such creatures as the fairy wren, the stalk-eyed fly, and the African elephant. Her new book is Dr Tatianas Sex Advice to All Creation.. Judson has also written for The Economist,Nature, and Science.

Doctor Elaine Abrams and Doctor Stephen Nicholas are pediatricians who work with babies born with HIV. While many children have died, some have survived into adolescence. Abrams is the director of the Family Care Center at Harlem Hospital Center, and Dr. Nicholas is the director of pediatrics there. They treated the first wave of babies infected with HIV at the height of the epidemic in Harlem in the 1980s. They have studied the effects of the virus on the children's physical and mental health as well as the toll on the community. Some of the children spent years in the hospital.

Veteran registered nurses Kim Armstrong and Audrey Ludmer. Armstrong is currently working in obstetrics with high-risk labor and delivery in the Seattle area. Ludmer works in a peri-operative care center for endoscopy patients in the Manhattan area. Both will talk about how the nursing shortage and hospital cutbacks have affected hospital health care.