Synopses & Reviews
A world-class oncologist's devastating and deeply personal examination of cancer
We have lost the war on cancer. We spend $150 billion each year treating it, yet — a few innovations notwithstanding — a patient with cancer is as likely to die of it as one was fifty years ago. Most new drugs add mere months to one's life at agonizing physical and financial cost.
In The First Cell, Azra Raza offers a searing account of how both medicine and our society (mis)treats cancer, how we can do better, and why we must. A lyrical journey from hope to despair and back again, The First Cell explores cancer from every angle: medical, scientific, cultural, and personal. Indeed, Raza describes how she bore the terrible burden of being her own husband's oncologist as he succumbed to leukemia. Like When Breath Becomes Air, The First Cell is no ordinary book of medicine, but a book of wisdom and grace by an author who has devoted her life to making the unbearable easier to bear.
Review
"With command and clarity, Azra Raza indicts the cancer industry with such force that it begs the question: Are we really winning the cancer war? The First Cell is an intricately woven, often lyrical, tapestry of anecdote and authority that returns the suffering patient to the foreground of medical innovation." Tina Brown, journalist and author of The Diana Chronicles
Review
"An affecting, fascinating, timely, and uncompromisingly honest look at where we stand in treating the most fearsome disease in most people's worry list." Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
Review
"[Raza] engages readers in a commitment to finding a better way. Intelligence, empathy, and optimism inform the argument for new research on cancer that could obviate the suffering prevalent today." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"The First Cell is the rare book that brings both a personal and scientific experience of cancer together. It questions the profiteering that floods our environment with carcinogens in the first place, and also those that profit from treating it. Azra Raza puts our focus where it should be: on prevention and early detection."
Gloria Steinem
About the Author
Azra Raza is the Chan Soon-Shiong professor of medicine and the director of the MDS Center at Columbia University. In addition to publishing widely in basic and clinical cancer research, Raza is also the coeditor of the highly acclaimed website 3QuarksDaily.com. She lives in New York City.