Finding the Achilles Heel
This episode starts at a moment of optimism: Scientists believe they have cracked the mystery of the malignant cell, and the first targeted therapies have been developed. But very quickly cancer reveals new layers of complexity and a formidable arra...
Magic Bullets
The search for a cure is the greatest epic in the history of science, spanning centuries and continents. This film centers on the story of Sidney Farber, who defied conventional wisdom in the late 1940s to introduce the modern era of chemotherapy. H...
The Blind Men and the Elephant
This episode picks up the story in the wake of the declaration of a “war on cancer” by Richard Nixon in 1971 and the search for a cure. Three causation theories emerge linking cancer to viruses, chemicals, and genes that divide the scientific co...
Scottsboro: An American Tragedy
In March of 1931, two white women stepped off a train in Paint Rock, Alabama, and accused nine black teenage passengers of gang rape. So began the Scottsboro case, one of the 20th century’s most fiery legal battles. This episode of American Experi...
Awakening: Makers: Women Who Make America
The story of the birth of the modern Women’s Movement is framed by two important publications - The Feminine Mystique and Ms. Magazine - and by the women who authored them: Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. When Friedan’s book came out in 1963, ...
Changing the World: Makers: Women Who Make America
The Women’s Movement begins to break out of the campuses and urban centers where it originated to affect nearly every man, woman and child in America. In the early 1970s, feminism became a force that reshaped the relationships between men and wome...
Charting a New Course: Makers: Women Who Make America
A focused look at the workplace, where individual women crashed through the glass ceiling, and to the courts, where they waged a battle against the “hidden injuries” of battery, harassment and rape. Two women - in very different ways - asserted ...