A 12-week old unborn baby with a fatal heart defect...a skier drowned for an hour in a frozen Norwegian lake...a comatose brain surgery patient...a teenager with four rapidly expanding tumors. Twenty years ago all of them would have been given up for dead-with no realistic hope for their survival. But today, thanks to incredible new advances by pioneering physicians and medical researchers, each of these individuals is alive and well, having literally cheated death.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta-neurosurgeon, Chief Medical Correspondent for CNN, and bestselling author-in , chronicles the almost unbelievable science that has made these seemingly miraculous recoveries possible, recoveries achieved by a bold new breed of doctors who refuse to accept that any life is irretrievably lost. Drawing on extensive case files and his unprecedented access to breaking news in his field, Dr. Gupta clearly and dramatically explains how revolutionary technological advances are extending our understanding of the human body's survival mechanism-and literally shifting the line between life and death. Through these deeply personal and often moving stories of medical triumphs over almost unthinkable barriers, Dr. Gupta transforms all our assumptions about the limits at the beginning and end of human life.