Charles Graeber

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles Graeber once co-authored papers for scientific journals. He moved through labs and clinics the way someone training for a medical career tends to do. Then he became a journalist. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that Graeber "has been drawn to extremes throughout his reporting career." She made that observation while reviewing his Wired article about Kim Dotcom. His byline has appeared in GQ, The New Yorker, Outside, and The New York Times. Born in Iowa, Graeber now divides his time between Nantucket, Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, New York. The work he built raises a simple question: what kind of stories does a former scientist choose to tell?

• 2. Medicine and Murder

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  Graeber's investigation of Charles Cullen began with a 2007 article in New York magazine. Cullen was a serial killer who worked as a nurse. The piece marked the first time Graeber put his reporting on the case into print. Six years later, that investigation became the book "The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder."

  The subtitle's terms, medicine, madness, and murder, define the book's territory. Cullen had committed his crimes within hospital systems, turning environments designed for healing into crime scenes. Graeber's account traced how that was possible, and the book found readers who would follow the story for years to come. Five years after it appeared, Graeber published a second book. This time the subject was not a killer inside medicine, but the researchers trying to cure cancer.

• 3. The Race to Cure Cancer

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  "The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer" appeared in 2018. Its title frames cancer immunotherapy as a race: a competition against disease, against time, and against the limits of existing medical knowledge. Where "breakthrough" names a destination, "race" acknowledges that researchers had not arrived there yet. Graeber's second book followed the people working toward that arrival. By 2022, the story he had first reported in 2007, about Charles Cullen, had found a new kind of audience through Netflix.

• 4. From Page to Screen

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  Netflix released a 2022 drama film based on "The Good Nurse." Graeber worked with the film's writer, Krysty Wilson-Cairns, and gave her access to the research materials he had used for his book. That collaboration gave Wilson-Cairns a direct line to years of original reporting on Charles Cullen.

  Graeber also became one of the executive producers of "Capturing the Killer Nurse," a 2022 Netflix documentary. Both films appeared in 2022: one a drama, one a documentary. The reporting Graeber had begun with a 2007 New York magazine article was still finding new uses fifteen years later.