A Better Understanding of Cancer
A review by Alden Mudge
Cancer, a disease with tens of millions of faces, will require many biographers. But those future biographers and historians of the disease will labor from deep within the long shadow cast by Siddhartha Mukherjee's remarkable The Emperor of All Maladies. Starting with the teachings of the Egyptian physician Imhotep (circa 2625 B.C.), Mukherjee's "biography of cancer" offers a sweeping "attempt to enter the mind of this immortal disease, to understand its behavior." It is a vivid and profoundly engaging read. Mukherjee, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a former Rhodes Scholar, is both a cancer physician and a cancer researcher. He is also extraordinarily good at explaining complex medical and scientific issues and controversies. He devotes most of his pages to developments in laboratory research and clinical treatment since the 1950s, as cancer medicine moved from a gruesome regimen of radical surgeries, through the development of radiation treatments,...
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