Douglas Starr traces the history of blood from ancient beliefs about its mystical properties through the development of modern transfusion medicine and into the catastrophic AIDS-contaminated blood scandals of the 1980s. The narrative begins with early experiments in blood transfusion during the seventeenth century, when physicians attempted to transfer animal blood into human patients with predictably disastrous results, and follows the slow accumulation of knowledge that eventually made transfusion safe—the discovery of blood types by Karl Landsteiner in 1901, the development of anticoagulants that allowed blood to be stored, and the creation of blood banks during the Second World War. Starr shows how each advance brought new complications: once blood could be collected, stored, and distributed, it became a commodity, and the economics of the blood trade introduced pressures that would prove lethal. The book's most gripping sections deal with the emergence of the global blood products industry in the postwar decades, when companies began purchasing plasma from prisoners, addicts, and impoverished donors in developing countries, then processing it into clotting factors for hemophiliacs and other products. When HIV entered the blood supply in the early 1980s, the industry's commercial incentives and regulatory failures combined to produce a disaster that infected thousands of hemophiliacs and transfusion recipients worldwide. Starr, a science journalist and professor at Boston University, reconstructs the institutional failures and individual decisions that allowed contaminated products to remain on the market long after the danger was known. The result is both a history of one of medicine's great achievements and an account of how commercial pressures can corrupt even life-saving science.