I was interviewed by the Capital Times recently. Here’s an excerpt (and here’s the full interview):

Tucker got the initial inspiration for “Blood Work” after coming across a vague reference to blood transfusion while doing research for a classroom lecture on William Harvey, the English physician credited with discovering blood circulation in 1628. Surprised that physicians were performing transfusions just 40 years later – and that the transfusions were between animals and humans – Tucker says she pulled an all-nighter reading through everything she could find on the subject in “Philosophical Transactions,” a publication of the British Royal Society, England’s first scientific group, which still serves an advisory function with the British government today.

“In the wee hours, I stumbled on the Denis case and I was mesmerized,” Tucker says. “It didn’t stop after that.”

However, it took inspiration from President George W. Bush for Tucker to realize Denis’ story would make more than just the center of an obscure academic article.

In his Jan. 31, 2006, State of the Union address, Bush argued for legislation that would “prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research (including) human-animal hybrids.” Two years before, the President’s Council on Bioethics had issued a report calling for the end of animal-human stem cell research to prevent “adventurous or renegade researchers,” adds Tucker.

“In looking at the cultural, scientific, religious, and political reaction following the State of the Union address, I just sensed that this needed to be a bigger book as a way to start a discussion and to tell a twistedly cool story,” she says.

And twisted it is. Like the best writers of narrative nonfiction, Tucker successfully moves between entertainment and teaching, using the Denis case as a springboard for bigger lessons about the spirituality of early scientists and the French and English scientific competition during the 17th century.