Fragile Beginnings:
Discoveries and Triumphs in the Newborn ICU
by Adam Wolfberg, M.D. ’88
A Harvard Health
Publications Book
Beacon Press, February 2012
Half a million babies are born prematurely in the United States every year. As doctors and parents make decisions about life-saving care in the first hours of a premature infant’s life, they must grapple with profound ethical and scientific questions: Who should be saved? How aggres-sively should doctors try to salvage the life of a premature baby, who may be severely neurologically and physically impaired? What will that child’s quality of life be like after millions of dollars are spent saving her? As a specialist in high-risk obstetrics, Dr. Adam Wolfberg explores those questions at the beginning of life from the frontlines of the NICU.
Dr. Wolfberg is also the father of a premature child, and he describes his daughter’s precipitous birth that left her tenuously hanging on to life. His book examines the limitations of newborn intensive-care medicine as well as the field of neuroplasticity, which looks at how the brain adapts to injury and change. Dr. Wolfberg also takes his readers into the lab, where researchers are hoping to dramatically improve the futures of children born too soon.