Visit his website at: Reviews for The Emperor of All Maladies. This work rests heavily on the shoulders of other books, studies, journal articles, memoirs, and interviews. This is the second step in the development of cancerous cells, as this renegade cell may now multiply as it pleases, eventually developing into cancerous tissue. Cancer cells can grow faster, adapt better. It is good to remember that scientists are human also and that knowledge is gained over time and experience. Hyperliterate, scientifically savvy, a hot-boiled detective novel spinning along axes of surgery, chemical and radiative therapy, molecular biology, bioinformatics, immunology, epidemiology and supercomputing -- there's a little bit here for every NT (and if you aren't NT*, then to hell with ya!
In Carla's marrow, this organization had been fully destroyed. "The Emperor of All Maladies" has empowered and humbled me. Dr. Mukherjee writes with grace and elegance about a topic that strikes fear like little else and takes the reader from a horrifying history, the effects of which still linger and haunt, to the fever-pitched decades of discovery, experimentation, fearlessness and compassion, to where we are now, which I am convinced is the cusp of medicine's finest hour. Though a big dense book, with tons of information, it is greatly written and explained in a way everyone can understand. Darkness, the authors suggested, was as much political as medical. How long would the treatment take? The math is that I quit 30 years ago - little cigars, intensely inhaled - a few years after my mother died of lung cancer. Their enthusiasm about the subject leads them to lose perspective: "the reader needs the whole story and will be thirsting for all the gory details; it would be criminal to leave anything out".
And he has an ear to quote others. In the United States, one in three women and one in two men will develop cancer during their lifetime. With beautiful metaphors, poignant case studies, breath-taking science and delectable literary allusions, Siddhartha Mukherjee takes us on a detailed yet panoramic trip spanning centuries. … The public willingly spends a third of that sum in an afternoon to watch a major football game. It was at this time that the proud Persian queen Atossa discovered a lump in her breast. Solzhenitsyn may have intended his absurdly totalitarian cancer hospital to parallel the absurdly totalitarian state outside it, yet when I once asked a woman with invasive cervical cancer about the parallel, she said sardonically, "Unfortunately, I did not need any metaphors to read the book. Penicillin, that precious chemical that had to be milked to its last droplet during World War II (in 1939, the drug was reextracted from the urine of patients who had been treated with it to conserve every last molecule), was by the early fifties being produced in thousand-gallon vats. Three of those early identified successful agents are the very ones Aria had in addition to 5 other cocktails. —Tony Judt, author of The Memory Chalet. The second dangerous characteristic of cancer cells is that they never age or self-destruct, whereas normal cells age and self-destruct if they become damaged. He was treated with the customary leeches and purging, but to no avail. Then again, one of Mukherjee's major points is that "cancer" is a collection of protean, complex, multifaceted things, evolution in situ possessing its own elegance and beauty, a noble and almost clever opponent.
Some viruses cause a chronic inflammation – this increases the cancer risk dramatically. She remembers looking up at the clock on the wall. For an oncologist in training, too, leukemia represents a special incarnation of cancer. But even skirting its periphery, I could still feel its power—the dense, insistent gravitational tug that pulls everything and everyone into the orbit of cancer. With Galen's black bile theory refuted, many scientists turned to a substance that was both external to the body, and invisible. And distorted and unleashed, it allows cancer cells to grow, to flourish, to adapt, to recover, and to repair—to live at the cost of our living.
But of all diseases, cancer had refused to fall into step in this march of progress. Its pace, its acuity, its breathtaking, inexorable arc of growth forces rapid, often drastic decisions; it is terrifying to experience, terrifying to observe, and terrifying to treat. —Bert Vogelstein, director, Ludwig Center at Johns Hopkins University. Call it superstition. MedicineThe New England journal of medicine. The 'biography' of cancer probably does not have an end point, but there is every chance that we can live long lives alongside it. Not a lot, but a bit.
5/5Readable linear history of cancer treatment with a strong emphasis on the characters - biomedical researchers, physicians, surgeons, patients and publicists - behind the transforming landscape of layperson may wish to first read Mukherjee's more technical The Gene: An Intimate History (2016) to appreciate some of the latest research he outlines. The history of the patient used to be seen as essential in sorting out what's wrong. Each of the apparently infinite number of characters in the book is introduced in Mukherjee's characteristically breezy style, then immediately fixed in amber by means of a trio of adjectives. But Lasker and Farber only exemplify the grit, imagination, inventiveness, and optimism of generations of men and women who have waged a battle against cancer for four thousand years.