Health & Medicine

Goemaere is head of Doctors Without Borders ( Medecins Sans Frontieres) in South Africa and a leading AIDS activist for South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign. He was recently featured on a Frontline report, "AIDS Treatment for Africa: The South African Struggle," that appeared on PBS.

Kushner adapted his epic Tony-award winning play Angels in America into a screenplay for HBO (broadcast this month in two three-hour parts). The play is set in New York in the mid-1980s during the midst of the AIDS epidemic. The HBO film is directed by Mike Nichols and stars Al Pacino, Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson. Kushner also has a new semi-autobiographical musical Caroline, or Change at the Public Theater in New York.

TV critic David Bianculli reviews the HBO production of Angels in America.

Her new book is Jung: A Biography. Bair chronicles the life and work of the influential Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung. Bair won the National Book Award for her biography of Samuel Beckett, and she's also written books about the lives of Anais Nin and Simone de Beauvoir.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews The Station Agent, an independent film written and directed by Tom McCarthy.

His novel The Pleasure of My Company follows his best-selling novella Shopgirl. He wrote the play Picasso at The Lapin Agile and is the author of a collection of short stories, Cruel Shoes. Martin's screenwriting credits include L.A. Story and Roxanne. He has also starred in such films as The Jerk; Planes, Trains and Automobiles; The Lonely Guy; Parenthood; Father of the Bride; Housesitter; Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid; All of Me; The Man with Two Brains; Sgt. Bilko; Leap of Faith and Little Shop of Horrors. He won a Grammy Award for his album Let's Get Small.

Farmer is an infectious disease specialist and a recipient of the MacArthur "genius" grant for his work treating tuberculosis in Haiti. He is the subject of the new book Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder.

Dr. Sheri Fink's new book is War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival. It's about a group of doctors who treated patients in Srebrenica, Bosnia, under the most extreme conditions. They treated thousands of patients, often without electricity, water or proper medicine. Fink, a physician and writer based in New York, works with the humanitarian organization International Medical Corps. She just returned from Iraq and has also worked in the Balkans, southern Africa and Central Asia.

Murray has written a new collection of short stories, A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies. Many of his stories are informed by his experiences as a doctor with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Epidemic Intelligence Service when he traveled to developing countries like Burundi, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Murray is also a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

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.