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Producer Ravida Din discusses the film “Pink Ribbons, Inc.,” with AnneMarie Ciccarella, of Breast Cancer Action, and Samantha King, Associate Professor, School of Kinesiology & Health Studies/Cultural Studies Program at Queen's University in Canada and author of the book Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy, on which the film is based. They discuss the pink ribbon campaigns for breast cancer and how the breast cancer movement has moved from activism to consumerism. “Pink Ribbons, Inc.” opens June 1 at IFC Center.

Paul Zak tells us about oxytocin, a chemical messenger that accounts for why some people are generous, trustworthy, and faithful and others aren’t. His book The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity looks at decades of research on what oxytocin is and how it works.  

Robin Hesketh, professor in the department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, gives a history the science of cancer and the medical advances made over the decades. In Betrayed by Nature: The War on Cancer, he leads a tour of human biology to show what happens to the body when the disease develops and how it’s treated.

In China, Asiatic black bears are kept in cages for their bile, which is valued in Asian medicine. Jill Robinson, the founder and CEO of Animals Asia, who appears in the documentary "Cages of Shame," talks about bear bile farming and bear rescue efforts.

"Cages of Shame" premiers at the Rubin Museum of Art April 14.

This year, hundreds of thousands of Americans will travel abroad, not to see ancient ruins or visit historic sites, but to undergo affordable medical care. These medical tourists will go to Mexico, Thailand, Costa Rica and elsewhere for everything from root canals to hip replacements. And while this type of tourism has been around for decades, it’s become more and more popular as health-care costs in the U.S. continue to rise. Paul Vehorn is a behavioral psychologist who’s visited Thailand for two different procedures, and James Surowiecki is a journalist with the New Yorker who explores what the bigger economic implications of medical tourism might be in his article entitled “Club Med.”

Science writer Dick Teresi examines why what we think of as life and death, consciousness and nonconsciousness, is not exactly clear, and he looks at how this problem has been complicated by the business of organ harvesting. His book is The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers—How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death.

Please Explain is all about the anti-anxiety medications benzodiazepenes. Psychologist Dr. Douglas Mennin and Lisa Miller, contributing editor at New York magazine, whose article “Listening to Xanax” appears in the March 26 issue of the magazine, explain how they work and why they’re addictive.

In late 2008, researchers found a strain of malaria that was resistant to a drug that held had promise for eliminating malaria in western Cambodia. Matthew Power, a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine, explains why officials are now trying to contain the region – and why that containment strategy is almost impossible to implement. His article, “Slipping Through the Net” is in the April issue of Harper’s.

Palliative-care physician Dr. Ira Byock argues that end-of-life care is one of the biggest national crises facing us today, and that politics has trumped reason when it comes to addressing the issue. In The Best Care Possible: A Physician’s Quest to Transform Care through the End of Life Dr. Byock explains what palliative care is and why he believes we must reform our health care system and move past our cultural aversion to talking about death.

Iain McGilchrist, a former consultant psychiatrist, looks at why the brain is divided into two hemispheres. In his book, The Master and His Emissary, he draws on case histories and other brain research to show how different the right and left sides of our brains are, what each side helps us do, and why the left hemisphere is taking more precedence in the modern world.

Each Thursday in March, Alice Park, Time Magazine staff writer who covers health and medicine, talks about sleep. Today's topic: sleep apnea.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta talks about his novel, Monday Mornings. The story follows five surgeons at Chelsea General Hospital in Massachusetts who discuss their bad outcomes at something known as the Morbidity and Mortality conference. The novel is about what they learn from their mistakes, both professional and personal.

Each Thursday in March, Alice Park, Time Magazine staff writer who covers health and medicine, talks about sleep. Today: a new study about the risks of sleeping pills.

Listeners: What other sleep issues would you like to hear about as part of this series? Tell us your suggestions for future segments on sleep. Comment here!

This week a Federal Drug Administration panel backed the approval of a weight loss drug called Qnexa. Strictly intended for use by clinically overweight people with BMIs over 27kg/m², Qnexa is a combination of an already-existing weight loss drug and another drug not yet approved for weight loss. At present, many doctors use this particular combination of drugs to treat obese patients, but this approval would allow them not to go "off the label" with their prescriptions.

The Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM) is a dictionary that defines and classifies all mental health disorders. First published in 1952, the DSM is used by everyone from clinicians to pharmaceutical companies to policy makers. Since its inception, the DSM has been revised only four times — one such occasion was in 1980 when homosexuality was no longer defined as a mental disorder. In the fifth edition, another big change may come to the DSM. Autism is up for a redefinition which could potentially reduce the number of people considered "autistic" by half.

Tuberculosis remains one of the world’s deadliest diseases—accounting for 9.4 million cases and 1.7 million deaths in 2009, according to the WHO. Maryn McKenna, science journalist and author of Superbug, and Dr. Neil Schluger, Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology, and Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University Medical Center and Chief Scientific Officer for the World Lung Foundation, give us a history of the disease, how it spreads, why it’s so hard to treat, and how drug-resistant TB has emerged and what it means for the future of treating the deadly disease.

Bryan Anderson, who served two tours of duty in Iraq and was awarded a Purple Heart, talks about the day he was wounded and what I went through during rehab, and his struggle to recover. His memoir No Turning Back: One Man's Inspiring True Story of Courage, Determination, and Hope is about his service and his recovery.

Dr. Abraham Verghese first joined The Takeaway as part of the "My America" series. Verghese was raised in Ethiopia, by parents from India. He immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s for a medical residency, and then to rural Tennessee treat gay men afflicted with HIV. Later, he became a professor at Stanford University Medical School and the author of the best-sellers, "My Own Country" and "Cutting for Stone."

In an unprecedented move, the United States government has asked two scientific journals to redact details of biomedical experiments which it fears could be used by terrorists to create deadly viruses. Two labs in the U.S. and the Netherlands recently created easily transmittable versions of the A(H5N1) virus, which causes bird flu. Though bird flu is highly lethal, it is not easily contracted by humans. Scientists have long been concerned an easily transferable version of the virus could create one of the deadliest pandemics in history. 

New York is a city of specialists from foodies to academics, laborers to shopkeepers. Every Wednesday, Niche Market will take a peek inside a different specialty store and showcase the city's purists who have made an art out of selling one commodity. Slideshow below.