(Still, as The Emperor of All Maladies shows extremely well, those awkward, almost blind efforts to find ways to fight cancer, in many cases, gave patients more months and years and, for the lucky ones, a full lifetime to live.)Īnd that the declaration of war on cancer in the 1970s - as if it were as simple (relatively) as putting people on the Moon - had no hope of victory. Which is that cancer is and will be the companion of humanity for a long time, and probably forever.Īnd that the search for a “cure” over the past century was, essentially, ham-fisted, lacking the nuance that today’s scientists and doctors are aware of and dealing with. I’m sure I can’t explain in detail how Mukherjee reaches those insights, but I have a sense of their implication. Old observations crystallize into new theories time past is always contained in time future. (page 472)īut with cancer, where no simple, universal, or definitive cure is in sight - and is never likely to be - the past is constantly conversing with the future. We can rid ourselves of cancer, then, only as much as we can rid ourselves of the processes of our physiology that depend on growth - aging, regeneration, healing, reproduction. (page 452)Ĭancer, we have discovered is stitched into our genome….Cancer is a flaw in our growth, but this flaw is deeply entrenched in ourselves. And I didn’t understand many of the details of the final section although I did grasp some key points.Įvery patient’s cancer is unique because every cancer genome is unique. My brain doesn’t handle scientific information well. As his reader, though, I was a failure in this last section.

Mukherjee is a fine writer, very clear, very direct with a sharp eye for emotional and physical detail.

It was difficult for me because the final 130 or so pages of The Emperor of All Maladies deals with the exquisitely refined scientific searchings and discoveries of the nature of cancer and of new methods for attacking various versions of the disease. Many know people who have died from it.Ī poignant element for me as I read this book over the last month or so was to learn from the news that Janet Rowley, a University of Chicago researcher mentioned often in Mukherjee’s text, had died on December 17, of complications from ovarian cancer. Most of us know someone who has or has had cancer, or have or have had it ourselves. It is difficult, in part, because cancer is a great fear. That’s not because it’s a bad book, but because it is such a thorough, courageous look at a disease - well, a family of many diseases - that is bedeviling humanity to an ever greater extent today as we live longer and survive or avoid other causes of death. The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee was a difficult book for me to read, as I suspect it will be for most people.

The emperor of all maladies cancer