This book contains a story and an essay, connected by a singular event. The story is an American one, complete with a happy ending, of how polio was defeated in the United States. The essay is on the incentives that shape vaccine research and manufacturing today. The essential message of the essay is that were a disease like polio to emerge today, it might prove harder for the United States to defeat the disease, despite decades of advancement in science and medicine. The story of triumph that opens the book becomes, in the end, a tragedy—and one of our own making. And what about the event that connects the story and essay? That, as you might have guessed, was a lawsuit. I told you this was an American story. The narrative begins in 1955, with a mother taking her daughter and son to the pediatrician. They were lucky, she believed. Her children were to be among the first to receive the Salk vaccine. They were to be protected from the scourge that had killed and crippled thousands of children. Sadly, days later, the daughter contracted polio from the vaccine itself. She, like her brother, had been given vaccine produced by Cutter Laboratories. Her brother was lucky, but she became a victim of what later became known as the “Cutter Incident.” At this point, the book draws back to describe the important events that led up to that dreadful incident, including the heightened concern, if not panic, that gripped the country during the polio epidemics, and the rivalry between the great polio researchers, Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin. These and other elements of this story are familiar, but they are told well, and the book contains many facts of which I was previously unaware. The author, Paul Offit, not only knows his subject but has researched it. Much of this research is original. If there is a single hero in this book, it is Salk, although Offit explains that Salk’s achievement depended on a great many people making a variety of contributions—some small, some large, and not all of them helpful. A few of these people proved to be as essential to the overall enterprise as Salk himself. But Salk’s discovery of “immunologic memory,” Offit believes, was reason enough to award him the Nobel Prize he was denied. It is a human tendency to celebrate the mythic hero—a person such as Salk. But in addition to the dozens of other scientists who contributed to the development of the polio vaccines, literally millions of people, mostly mothers, contributed their time and resources to raise the dimes needed to pay for the research. This, I believe, is another aspect of this story that is almost uniquely American. Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in the early nineteenth century, noted the peculiar tendency of Americans to volunteer, to associate, and to organize for a common cause, and that is just what the March of Dimes did in the mid-twentieth century—and to superb effect. The public’s involvement in financing the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis helped raise expectations for a successful out-