Blood Money: From Butte to Beijing + Q&A with award-winning journalist Kathleen McLaughlin

Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin knew she’d found a treatment that worked on her rare autoimmune disorder. She had no idea it had been drawn from the veins of America’s most vulnerable for immense profit. Assigned to work in China, McLaughlin hesitated to use that country’s scandal-plagued plasma supply. After McLaughlin returns to her hometown of Butte, Montana, a visiting Chinese researcher warns her of troubling echoes between America’s domestic plasma supply chain and the one she’d seen spin out into chaos in China. McLaughlin discusses her decade-long mission to learn the full story of where her medicine comes from. Her book, "Blood Money: The Story of Life, Death, and Profit Inside America's Blood Industry," was published Feb. 28, 2023 by Atria/One Signal Publishers.

Kathleen McLaughlin is an award-winning journalist who reports and writes about the consequences of economic inequality around the world. A frequent contributor to The Washington Post and The Guardian, McLaughlin’s reporting has also appeared in The New York Times, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, The Economist, NPR, and more. She is a former Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT and has won multiple awards for her reporting on labor in China. Blood Money is her first book.