Book Review
I had known about this book for a few years, having heard that it won a Pulitzer in 2011, but I never read it. The enormous length and depth of the explanation of a scary disease are what stopped me. But over the last year, since I work in a biotech company primarily in cancer research, I finally found enough courage and curiosity to start reading it.
The book presents a person’s lifecycle rather than a disease’s journey. Mukherjee explains that cancer is as old as humanity and talks about an interesting fact of breast cancer reported in a certain Egyptian queen. He explains that the biography of cancer spans over decades and involves several researchers spending their lives pursuing a magic bullet or cancer cure.
After the description of cancer was recorded on papyrus in Egypt in 1600 BC, for about the next 2000 years, there was no substantial evidence of cancer anywhere. The understanding of modern cancer began in the early 19th century as researchers slowly started seeing suspicious cases of a group of diseases which were incurable.
Cancer begins with one cell
A single unknown cell in a congregation of over a trillion cells decides to go rogue and divide itself to extremities. Depending on the origin of the cell, the cancer is classified. There are Leukemias, sarcomas, lymphomas, bone cancers, melanoma and many others and all of them begin with one cell.
The book presents the journey of Sidney Farber, a pathologist in children’s diseases. In 1947, while performing autopsies, he found leukaemia cells. He characterised them as so fast-moving that a healthy child died within a few days. He built a new hospital in 1952 and met Mary Lasker, a medical philanthropist.
The book further explains how the idea of cancer is rooted in the minds of people in society and how it led to the formation of the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR). While on one side, people slowly realised the horrors of this silent killer disease, the fight to present it politically was a different one altogether. It was not until 1971 that president Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act, which authorised spending of $1.5 billion over the next three years.
While people were getting to know the disease, medical researchers, on the other hand, fumbled about the origin of this disease. There were periodic claims of a “cure” for cancer, but a cure must be reproducible, which rarely happened. Some scientists declared an all-out war to eradicate this disease, while other researchers delved deeper to understand it so that it could be eliminated from the base.
During the entire second half of the 19th century, medical journals saw many articles claiming to be an absolute cure for cancer; sadly, none of them remained. The disease quietly kept on growing. There were moments in history when someone came close to it or were in the general direction of killing cancer. Still, these moments were inconsequential against an emperor who has been prevalent and at large for thousands of years.
Cigarette manufacturers never believed that smoking could be related to cancer
An interesting part of this book was the war against cigarette manufacturers and lung cancer. Mukherjee writes that in the 60s and 70s, cigarette consumption exploded among people. Men, women and even children smoked cigarettes, and there was no control over it. The concept that cigarette smoking can cause cancer or harm health was a laughing matter. Cigarette manufacturers never believed that smoking could be related to cancer, and every case against them was thwarted. It took several court cases simply to explain and convince that smoking is injurious to health and many more to relate it to cancer.
The book later explores the relationship between oncogenes and carcinogens and their role in cancer. Further, it sheds light on modern cancer research and the discovery of chemotherapy – a combination of poisons to combat the deadly disease.
The best thing about this book is the way Mukherjee structured it, explaining it thread by thread in its entirety. Starting from the first recorded case of cancer to its nomenclature and various milestones with all attempts to curb the disease. The book ends on the note of Gleevac – a drug which was popular when the book came out in 2010, and there have been many advances on cancer since then, but to know the journey of the disease is fascinating.
Pick up this book if you want to know the history of cancer!
You can know more about the author Siddhartha Mukherjee here