The Emperor of all Maladies

I went to a reading and talk this evening by cancer physician and researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee, about his book "The Emperor of all Maladies", a biography of cancer, which won a 2011 Pulitzer Prize. It was very interesting. He talked about how the view of cancer has changed thru the years. In the 1950's, when a group wanted to have an advertisement for the fight against breast cancer, the New York Times would not print it. They had to refer to women with "diseases of the chest wall."

He said he had been asked if his book were "political", and didn't understand why the question arose at first. Then he found that it was because he talks about how cancer cells mutate and evolve. On the prospects for progress in research in this area, he said one problem is that we do not have a culture that encourages young people to go into science, because our culture has become so anti-science.

Someone asked about Steve Jobs, who died yesterday. He said that in the case of such rare cancers, they were usually all caused by the same mutation, and so should be easier to find treatment for it. He pointed out that funding has been cut for agencies that do cancer research, and that it is the voters who elect the people who make the choices to cut the funding. As he said, we failed Steve Jobs.

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