The Age of Cures: How American Scientists Saved Your Life

by Barry Werth

From the acclaimed author of Billion Dollar Molecule and The Antidote, a revisionist, passionate history of the pharmaceutical industry, detailing how the nascent industry ushered in an age of cures.

For the past thirty-five years, the acclaimed author Barry Werth has been covering one of the most consequential and underappreciated stories of our time—the rise of pharmaceutical companies, along with the science of drug research and the people who make it all happen. Now he delivers The Age of Cures, a fascinating, in-depth history of the birth of the pharmaceutical industry in the United States, and reveals how that industry created the “miracle drugs” that have saved billions of lives.

In the early part of the 20th century, patients routinely died from the flu, if they didn’t contract a deadlier disease such as rubella, mumps, or polio first. But with advances in technology, the young talent at universities across the country, and the significant investment from a federal government eager to prepare for a second world war, medicine exploded in the 1930s to the 1960s to finally meet the needs of a sick populace. Vitamins, penicillin, wide-spectrum antibiotics, cortisone, a polio vaccine, and cancer chemotherapy revolutionized health care.

Werth brings medicine’s unsung heroes—including Max Tishler, James Conant, George Merck, Alfred Newton Richards, Vannevar Bush, and Selman Waksman—to life in this impassioned and compelling chronicle of the golden age of scientific progress. He also shows us how this crucial investment in science modernized the United States, establishing a scientific powerhouse for decades to come.

A lively work of science history, The Age of Cures is a case study of the values that made American research a model for the world, and a reminder of how society relies on investments in its scientists.

Genres: History, Science, Nonfiction

Audible Audio

Published September 22, 2026

Reviews

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos]

What Happens After the Miracle Works
In “The Age of Cures,” Barry Werth traces the scientists, laboratories, companies, patents, rivalries, and rules that turned modern medicine into an age of extraordinary possibility – and made success itself the next problem to solve.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | August 27th, 2026

Dying of streptococcal septicemia in 1942, Anne Miller had already endured operations, transfusions, and sulfa drugs when a tiny cache of penicillin was rushed to her hospital. There was so little of it that some had to be recovered from her urine and purified for reuse. Within hours, her fever broke; soon the bacteria disappeared from her blood. Barry Werth’s “The Age of Cures: How American Scientists Saved Your Life” does not flinch from the old vocabulary of miracle, and here the word earns its keep. Penicillin works. But so does the chain around it: government coordination, industrial chemistry, clinical judgment, air transport, manufacturing skill. All of them have to meet at one bedside in time. A cure may fit in a syringe. Its history does not.

Even at its most exuberant, “The Age of Cures” is less interested in the biography of a drug than in the machinery that gets one out of the laboratory and into a body. Werth begins in the therapeutic helplessness exposed by the 1918 influenza pandemic and moves through wartime mobilization, antibiotics, cortisone, polio vaccination, pharmaceutical marketing, congressional scrutiny, and the regulatory settlement of the early 1960s. Again and again, discovery turns out to be the beginning of the difficult part. Somebody has to make enough of the substance, test it, move it, price it, prescribe it, and decide what happens when enthusiasm travels faster than evidence. Discovery is not an instant. It is an infrastructure.

Max Tishler, a poor immigrant boy who delivers mostly useless remedies through influenza-stricken Boston and grows into one of Merck’s defining chemists, occupies the stubborn middle of that process. Around him move James Conant, Vannevar Bush, George Merck, Alfred Newton Richards, Selman Waksman, Jonas Salk, Estes Kefauver, and a considerable population of researchers, executives, physicians, and officials. Werth gives us a cast list because no single life can hold the story. Nearly every cure here has too many parents, and some of those parents will later argue about custody.

Early chapters return to a country with modern laboratories but no coherent scientific order. German chemistry dominates important medicines and industrial processes; American researchers scramble for money; physicians can name diseases they can scarcely alter. World War II changes the terms. Bush links federal money to universities and private laboratories. Richards gets institutions accustomed to guarding their own work to cooperate. Penicillin becomes the persuasive case for this new arrangement, not because government discovers it or industry owns it, but because neither can do enough alone. The achievement deserves Werth’s admiration. It also makes the later arguments about who should control the fruits of such cooperation considerably less tidy.

The prose follows causes as they change scale. A fever opens onto a fermentation problem; a laboratory reaction becomes a manufacturing decision; a manufacturing decision eventually reaches a patent office or Senate chamber. Werth handles technical explanation without sprinkling fairy dust over the chemists, and he preserves the brute physicality of science: substances have to be isolated, heated, purified, fermented, injected, swallowed. His longer sentences carry considerable freight, then often stop with a curt judgment. Occasionally he interprets a scene after the scene has already interpreted itself. He likes his arrows drawn. More often, the method gives this densely peopled book the velocity of reported narrative rather than the drag of institutional chronicle.

Religion, war, and prospecting keep turning up in Werth’s language. Scientists become apostles, medicines miracles, soil paydirt. The metaphors are sometimes worked until their elbows show, but they fit his subject for a reason. Laboratories may answer to data, yet people still build orthodoxies around methods and reputations. Cortisone acquires believers. Research programs have founding fathers. Rival approaches begin to look like sects. Werth is interested in the moment confidence ceases to be provisional. A medicine can deserve trust without earning the right to be worshiped.

In Tishler, the book has a scientist whose specialty is everything that sounds less glamorous than discovery and proves just as consequential. He is a developer, process chemist, organizer, the person asking whether an interesting compound can be made in useful quantities without bankrupting everyone who needs it. Riboflavin, penicillin, streptomycin, cortisone, vitamin B12: the question keeps recurring in different clothes. Can the substance escape the flask? Popular histories tend to sprint from eureka to cure. Tishler lives in the miles between them, where yields improve, costs fall, dangerous steps are replaced, and chemistry becomes supply. Werth finds drama there anyway.

Penicillin gives Werth his cleanest story of cooperation. Streptomycin quickly makes the arrangement messier. Selman Waksman’s laboratory develops a systematic way to search microorganisms for useful compounds; his graduate student Albert Schatz performs dangerous bench work that helps isolate the antibiotic that changes tuberculosis treatment. Success promptly creates a second experiment, this one in ownership. Waksman sees the research program he designed. Schatz sees his labor and priority disappearing into his mentor’s fame and royalties. Neither description is frivolous. The system learns how to make a cure before it learns how to divide the glory.

As more cures arrive, the categories that organized the early chapters start slipping. A patent can make expensive research worth pursuing and keep competitors outside the gate. Industrial scale moves a drug from scarcity toward abundance, but scale belongs to somebody. Competition makes laboratories move faster; it also gives sales departments reason to make one chemically similar product sound indispensable. Werth wants to recover the conditions under which American pharmaceutical research became astonishingly productive. His own evidence keeps showing that those conditions came with appetites attached.

Perhaps cortisone makes the point most intimately. It can return movement to patients crippled by inflammatory disease, then produce grave physical and psychiatric effects. Werth’s excursion through Nicholas Ray’s “Bigger than Life” initially seems almost luxuriant and then earns its pages. James Mason’s schoolteacher is saved by cortisone, becomes grandiose and tyrannical under its influence, and nearly destroys the family the drug allowed him to return to. Nothing about the medicine’s usefulness is exposed as fraudulent. That is what makes the story disturbing. Efficacy does not abolish danger. Sometimes it gives danger better cover.

And then the Salk vaccine moves the problem from one body to an entire manufacturing apparatus. The massive field trial demonstrates that the vaccine works. The country celebrates. Cutter Laboratories nevertheless ships vaccine containing live poliovirus; children are paralyzed, and scientific validation collides with industrial execution. Two questions that public enthusiasm had allowed to blur suddenly pull apart. Does the vaccine work? Can every manufacturer reproduce that result safely, lot after lot? Science has not lied. Success has outrun the institutions meant to carry it.

Drug companies enter the final third with evidence in their favor. Their laboratories are not selling imaginary benefits; they have helped turn diseases that routinely killed into diseases doctors can treat. This is why Werth’s later chapters are more interesting than a simple exposure of corporate vice. Pharmaceutical executives can answer critics by pointing, quite literally, to what their products have done to mortality and suffering. The industry can point to the medicine cabinet itself. The less comfortable argument concerns how much privilege that achievement should buy.

In “Selling Sickness” and “The Curse of Bigness,” Senator Estes Kefauver’s investigators start doing arithmetic. Corticosteroid markups look absurd until they look cruel. Supposed competitors charge the same prices. Licensing arrangements help keep smaller manufacturers out. Promotional campaigns marketed as physician education make the distinction between informing doctors and creating demand increasingly slippery. Merck’s Diuril supplies the most interesting case because the drug itself is genuinely useful. As physicians begin prescribing it for hypertension, the availability of an effective pill helps move the border between illness and risk. People who feel perfectly well become candidates for long-term treatment. The medicine does not simply enter a disease category; it helps stabilize one.

Measured beside Alexander Zaitchik’s “Owning the Sun,” Werth grants the industrial laboratory more moral and historical weight because he has spent hundreds of pages showing what industry can actually do. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “The Emperor of All Maladies,” by contrast, possesses a formal advantage Werth can only envy: one disease pulls its immense story toward a center. “The Age of Cures” has no such magnet. It has tuberculosis, arthritis, polio, hypertension, cancer, patents, corporate mergers, Cold War politics, education, Hollywood, and Congress. Most belong. Some merely refuse to leave. The map occasionally grows faster than the journey.

If the book feels contemporary, it is not because one can staple today’s headlines to its final pages. The older bargain remains unresolved. Public money supports research whose rewards may become private property. Patent protection can encourage expensive experimentation and shelter prices from competition. Scientific institutions need enough independence to follow evidence and enough accountability to deserve public confidence. Werth’s history cannot settle these arguments because the achievements and the costs are both real. That is precisely why the arguments persist.

That unfinished bargain also marks the place where Werth stops slightly short of his own evidence. There was genuine deterioration as pharmaceutical companies grew: sales departments gained authority, promotional spending swelled, and market share began exerting pressure on scientific culture. But the book sometimes treats this later commercial order as a cleaner departure from an earlier ethos than its own pages allow. Patents, competition, ownership, prestige, secrecy, and private interest did not arrive one morning carrying suitcases. They had been inside the arrangement for years. The later industry did not simply betray the age of cures. It was, in part, one of that age’s products.

Rather than damage the history, this contradiction gives it friction. George Merck’s idealism can coexist with a profitable company. Waksman can build a method larger than any single experiment and still diminish the student who performed one of its decisive experiments. Government coordination can make penicillin abundant and government oversight can fail disastrously around polio vaccine. Werth’s evidence is most persuasive when it refuses to separate virtue from consequence too quickly. The cleaner version of the story would also be the less accurate one.

Only when Werth follows every tributary does the book begin to lose pressure. Conant’s educational afterlife, some Cold War detours, the finer points of corporate integration: all have reasons for being here, though reason and necessity are not quite the same thing. By the final third, the sequence of breakthrough, publicity, side effect, backlash, and regulation can occasionally be spotted while it is still coming around the bend. Werth has found so much material that he sometimes resembles a scientist reluctant to throw out a promising sample. A few discarded specimens would have sharpened the experiment.

Part of what makes the epilogue work is its sudden reduction in scale. Tishler leaves Merck, goes to Wesleyan, and encounters the young Joshua Boger, who will carry the story toward another era of drug research. Boger in turn speaks with the aging Waksman about discovery, money, institutions, public trust, and luck. After all the contracts, committees, patents, factories, and hearings, the machinery contracts. One scientist tells another what experience has taught him, and the younger man goes away with new questions.

On a 100-point scale, “The Age of Cures” earns 85/100, corresponding to 4/5 Goodreads stars. Its research is immense without usually becoming inert, and Werth has found a narrative shape for an object – the American pharmaceutical research apparatus – that does not naturally volunteer to become a protagonist. What keeps the book below the highest tier is the pressure it declines to apply to its own most unsettling discovery. Scale and authority did not simply make later abuses possible. They helped create the conditions in which medicine could accumulate so much money, trust, and leverage in the first place.

Ultimately, progress here looks less like a staircase than a relay. A boy who once carried remedies that could do almost nothing grows into a chemist who helps make medicines capable of altering fate, then passes his habits of mind to a scientist who will work in another age. Near the end, Waksman, the great prospector of soil, is returned to the earth he spent his life searching. The image comes close to arranging itself too perfectly, but its quietness saves it. Cures do not descend. They move from bench to body through labor, money, argument, accident, discipline, and trust. What one generation hands the next is not a miracle preserved under glass. It is the unfinished work of deciding what to do with one after it works.

[Allyson Dyar]

I usually don’t have a problem writing a review of a book that I’ve just finished reading. But in this case, it was difficult. I found it very problematic to put my thoughts into words until I had a revelation: the reason why I was having so much trouble was because the book was a literal jumble of ideas.

The premise of the book is to detail the rise of the American pharmaceutical giants, especially Merck, Sharpe, and Dohme. Merck is a company with which I am familiar through their Merck Manual, which I began purchasing in hardcover back in the Nineties and now use their free online and application versions.

When the book concentrates on specific narratives, such as the two World Wars and the discovery of streptomycin by Selman Waksman, it is quite a compelling read. Despite that, the discussion of streptomycin became unnecessarily bogged down with the overly detailed argument of who actually discovered streptomycin and the subsequent lawsuits. While this is historically important, it was unnecessarily detailed.

That was the problem I had with this book. There were pages and pages of unnecessary digressions that really had nothing to do with the subject at hand. For instance, the discovery of cortisol and its miraculous effect on the crippling disease of rheumatoid arthritis was hailed as a miracle of scientific achievement.

Unfortunately, what the scientists didn’t know was that at higher doses, it could cause mania or psychosis. In his story “Ten Feet Tall,” author Berton Roueche details the story of a man who shows symptoms of manic depressive psychosis due to the high dose of cortisol he was taking. A short paragraph or two about this story would have been sufficient.

Instead author Werth goes into unnecessary detail on both the story and the making of a movie based on the article “Bigger Than Life.” Again, the author goes into excruciatingly excessive details about the making of the movie, diverting the reader from the overall point of the book.

Another problem that I had with “The Age of Cures: How American Scientists Saved Your Life” was the fact that the author was following several different players in the pharmaceutical industry and it was difficult at times to remember who everyone was. Granted, major players had a simple biography at the beginning of the book, but a simple one-line recap would have been beneficial.

It’s hard for me to recommend this book because I’m not sure what audience would find it of interest. That said, if you feel that the subject of this book piques your interest, by all means give it a go, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.


2/5

[Thank you to NetGalley and the author for the advanced ebook copy in exchange for my honest and objective opinion, which I have given here.]

[Bonny]

Barry Werth’s The Age of Cures is an ambitious history of the rise of the American pharmaceutical industry, tracing the scientific breakthroughs that transformed medicine between the 1930s and 1960s. Werth clearly did an enormous amount of research, and the book is packed with details about the development of antibiotics, vaccines, cortisone, and the partnerships between universities, government, and private industry that reshaped modern healthcare.

What worked best for me was the sense of scale. Werth captures how terrifying illness once was before the arrival of so-called “miracle drugs,” and he effectively shows how quickly medicine evolved within just a few decades. Some sections, particularly those dealing with the race to develop penicillin and the polio vaccine, were genuinely compelling and gave me a new appreciation for the scientists and institutions involved.

That said, I found the book uneven as a reading experience. The level of detail can become overwhelming, and the narrative sometimes gets bogged down in long explanations of corporate structures, research funding, and scientific politics. While those elements are obviously important to the story Werth is telling, they occasionally overwhelm the book. I also struggled to connect emotionally with most of the people involved because the cast of researchers, executives, and institutions is so large.

Overall, this is a thoughtful and deeply researched work of medical history that will probably appeal most to readers with a strong interest in science, medicine, or the pharmaceutical industry. I admired it more than I loved it, but I still came away with a greater understanding of how modern medicine and America’s pharmaceutical dominance came to be.

Thank you to Edelweiss and Simon & Schuster for providing me with a copy of the book. It will be published on September 22, 2026.

[Dan]

My thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for an advanced copy of this history of the rise of the power, influence and affect that the pharmaceutical industry had has on Americans, the stories of great cures, great setbacks, great amounts of money, and how trust and distrust has always surrounded them, sometimes from bad people, but sometimes from bad actions by the industry itself.

My mother was a pediatric nurse in a major hospital in New York City, and later, after my brother and I were older, in a regional hospital in Connecticut. My Mom is a huge proponent of vaccines, and if questioned can cite cases, feeling and emotions of watching children suffer and even die because of childhood diseases, that unfortunately once thought gone, are making a comeback. My Mom is not a fan of the over prescribing of pills that seem prevalent in America especially in people her age. Mom takes two pills, while friends, family and even younger cousins need pill containers to keep track of their hourly prescriptions. In her long life she has seen friends suffer polio, and relatives who did their own research die of COVID. Much of this is covered in this remarkable book. The Age of Cures: How American Scientists Saved Your Life by medical journalist Barry Werth is a story of discovery, of science, the use, abuse mistakes and wonders that have been found, as well as the money made, reputations destroyed, and even lives lost from profit, honest mistakes, and bad influencers.

The book begins with a brief history of pharmaceuticals and explains how the writer, became first interested, and has covered the industry, along with the changes he has seen. The book focuses on a few people, young researchers like Max Tishler and James Conant, pharmaceutical owners like George Mereck, and other scientists and influences like Vannevar Bush and others. All left their mark, either discovering compounds, making connections or in Bush's way controlling how science was viewed, how it was funded, and even regulated. Werth looks at the rise of the chemical industry, starting in the war years of World War I, to the 60's and 70s. Discovery of cortisone, and polio. Along with the downplaying of side effects, and even the bad rollout of the Polio vaccine, which I knew about but not in detail. Even the pursuit of atomic power factors into the story, discussing how the roles of researched changed, and how much money could be made from science, something few thought about. Werth tracks the rise of marketing, as the new head of Merck saw that sick people were a small part of the market, that the industry really needed to market to well people, for profit. With a Senate hearing about price gouging that sounds remarkably like what is being discussed today.

A real interesting book that covers a lot of subjects. Atomic war, movies, the red scare, senate discussions on drug pricing. Also the amount of money that can be made from pills. Werth looks at everything from simple experiments, to deep research projects. Cover-ups to grand roll outs. And why many feel how they feel today about doing their own research, and what to believe. There is a lot here, but Werth does a good job of keeping everything together, and moving. The same names keep appearing, and one sees how policy, even the history of pharmaceuticals has been shaped by a few people. With a lot of money made in the process.

An interesting history, telling quite a bit about the rise of health, the rise of science, and the backlash against both. Readers of medical and cultural history will much to interest them here. Maybe even leading to an explanation of how we got to where we are now.

[Leslie Oberhaus]

A thorough, very interesting look at the beginnings of the pharmaceutical industry and the development of several products that impacted innumerable lives -- penicillin, cortisone, chemotherapy, and vitamins to name a few. The Age of Cures begins with the 1918 Influenza pandemic and takes you through to the 1962 Food, Drug, & Cosmetic Act amendments which enabled the Food & Drug Administration to require proof of efficacy (in addition to safety) for all newly proposed drugs. If you have an interest in medical, pharmaceutical, or FDA history, it's fascinating reading. Mixing biographical sketches of key players with details of the science and the politics involved, Werth provides a lively account of events which could be dry and boring. There is a little too much detail or time spent on the context and researcher backgrounds in some places, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading this.

I received a complimentary digital copy of this book, and I'm leaving my review voluntarily. All views are my own.

[Steve]

I found the specific information on the early days of the American pharmaceutical industry very interesting and I think the book did a good job of covering the major points. However, I felt that the discussions of the Cold War and weaponry were by far too detailed. I also thought that the case studies were much too long and there were too many transcripts. There were several times that the sentences ran on too long, making them difficult for me to parse. Overall though, the book was worth reading, despite certain challenges. Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the advance reader copy.

[Kathie Bennet]

The Age of Cures by Barry Werth is a compelling and insightful exploration of the rise of modern medicine and the pharmaceutical industry in the United States. Blending historical depth with scientific progress, the book highlights the transformative breakthroughs that reshaped public health. A thought provoking read for those interested in medical history and innovation.