A historian of medical futures looks back

Joanna Radin is an associate professor of the history of medicine and teaches across disciplines. She is the author of Life on Ice (University of Chicago Press, 2017), a book about American scientists’ efforts to collect and stockpile frozen blood samples from indigenous communities around the world; and co-editor with Emma Kowal, MBBS, PhD, an Australian medical anthropologist, of Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World (MIT Press, 2017). Radin has a new project forthcoming—a look at the history of American science through the work of physician-turned-author Michael Crichton, MD.