Sonia Stupniker Isard Lecture: You Bet Your Life - Book Talk

Join us for this year's Sonia Stupniker Isard Lecture featuring College Fellow, Dr. Paul Offit.

Dr. Offit, Director of Vaccine Education Center and Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Infection Diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, will discuss his newest book, You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation.

Dr. Offit will be joined in conversation with College President and CEO Dr. Mira Irons.

After hearing from Dr. Offit, please join us immediately following the talk for a light reception.

Event Timeline:

6pm - Conversation and Q and A with Dr. Paul Offit

7:15pm - Reception

Interested in purchasing your copy of You Bet Your Life?

After adding the event to your cart, please check off the box saying "Please reserve a signed book for me to purchase" under the Registration Information. Signed books will be reserved and held in the museum store.

Museum Members and College Fellows

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About The Book

Every medical decision—whether to have chemotherapy, an X-ray, or surgery—is a risk, no matter which way you choose. In You Bet Your Life, physician Paul A. Offit argues that, from the first blood transfusions four hundred years ago to the hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine, risk has been essential to the discovery of new treatments. More importantly, understanding the risks is crucial to whether, as a society or as individuals, we accept them.

Told in Offit’s vigorous and rigorous style, You Bet Your Life is an entertaining history of medicine. But it also lays bare the tortured relationships between intellectual breakthroughs, political realities, and human foibles. Our pandemic year has shown us, with its debates over lockdowns, masks, and vaccines, how easy it is to get everything wrong. You Bet Your Life is an essential read for getting the future a bit more right. 

About the Author

Paul A. Offit, MD is the Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia as well as the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology and a Professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Offit has published more than 160 papers in medical and scientific journals in the areas of rotavirus-specific immune responses and vaccine safety. He is also the co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, RotaTeq. recommended for universal use in infants by the CDC in 2006 and by the WHO in 2013.

Dr. Offit was a member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is currently a member of the FDA’s Vaccine Advisory Committee and is a founding advisory board member of the Autism Science Foundation and the Foundation for Vaccine Research.

He is also the author of ten medical narratives: The Cutter Incident: How America’s First Polio Vaccine Led to Today’s Growing Vaccine Crisis (Yale University Press, 2005), Vaccinated: One Man’s Quest to Defeat the World’s Deadliest Diseases (HarperCollins, 2007, Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure (Columbia University Press, 2008), Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All (Basic Books, 2011), Do You Believe in Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine (HarperCollins, 2013), Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine (Basic Books, 2015), Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong (National Geographic Press/Random House, April 2017), Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren’t Your Best Source of Health Information (Columbia University Press, June 2018), Overkill: When Modern Medicine Goes Too Far (HarperCollins, April, 2020), and You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccinations—The Long and Risky History of Medical Innovations (Basic Books, 2021).