Some people are of the opinion that cancer is a recent disease, just over a hundred years old, brought about by changes in lifestyle. However, oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee in his Pulitzer-winning The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2011) shows that there are records of cancer over the last five thousand years. Carefully preserved mummies have been studied and diagnosed to be bearing symptoms of cancer.
Mukherjee gives a detailed history of the disease from its earliest known origins (He calls it a “biography” treating cancer as if it were a living person). There are many fascinating threads in the book – one being the history of chemotherapy. When doctors realized that cancer was an uncontrolled proliferation of cells, they reacted by surgically excising the tumor. An account is given of William Halstead who in his “radical surgery” proposed hacking away at larger and larger portions of the human body to obliterate cancer. But it was only later realized that certain chemicals can distinguish between cancer cells and normal cells and selectively target the cancer cells. This was the beginning of chemotherapy.
Nowadays cancer is treated by a mix of chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, but it is acknowledged that cancer is essentially a genetic disease in which normal genes undergo a sequence of mutations that result in uncontrolled cell division. Few chemicals have been discovered that directly act upon the oncogene – Herceptin for certain breast cancers and Gleevec for a type of leukemia.
Cancer research is still ongoing: The Human Genome project has been succeeded by a Cancer Genome project that hopes to lay bare the molecular basis of cancer and hopefully more effective drugs with less harmful side-effects will be discovered.
A few years ago, I read a fascinating biography of researcher Judah Folkman called Folkman’s War (2001) by Robert Cooke which narrated how Folkman came with a novel therapy method called antiangiogenesis therapy. That book postulated that Folkman’s therapy would have a profound effect on cancer treatment and research. But Mukherjee makes only a passing mention of Judah Folkman and completely avoids discussion of antiangiogenesis therapy. I wonder why.
Mukherjee gives a detailed history of the disease from its earliest known origins (He calls it a “biography” treating cancer as if it were a living person). There are many fascinating threads in the book – one being the history of chemotherapy. When doctors realized that cancer was an uncontrolled proliferation of cells, they reacted by surgically excising the tumor. An account is given of William Halstead who in his “radical surgery” proposed hacking away at larger and larger portions of the human body to obliterate cancer. But it was only later realized that certain chemicals can distinguish between cancer cells and normal cells and selectively target the cancer cells. This was the beginning of chemotherapy.
Nowadays cancer is treated by a mix of chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, but it is acknowledged that cancer is essentially a genetic disease in which normal genes undergo a sequence of mutations that result in uncontrolled cell division. Few chemicals have been discovered that directly act upon the oncogene – Herceptin for certain breast cancers and Gleevec for a type of leukemia.
Cancer research is still ongoing: The Human Genome project has been succeeded by a Cancer Genome project that hopes to lay bare the molecular basis of cancer and hopefully more effective drugs with less harmful side-effects will be discovered.
A few years ago, I read a fascinating biography of researcher Judah Folkman called Folkman’s War (2001) by Robert Cooke which narrated how Folkman came with a novel therapy method called antiangiogenesis therapy. That book postulated that Folkman’s therapy would have a profound effect on cancer treatment and research. But Mukherjee makes only a passing mention of Judah Folkman and completely avoids discussion of antiangiogenesis therapy. I wonder why.
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