Cancer as Old Foe and Goad to Science - “The Emperor of All Maladies”

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On its first page “The Emperor of All Maladies” sets forth its intention: to be a definitive history of how cancer has been understood, treated, feared and politicized throughout all of recorded human history. That’s a staggeringly tall order. Yet the author, Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, seeks to make it even taller. His book also aspires to be “a biography of cancer,” even though Dr. Mukherjee (a cancer specialist and researcher with stellar credentials) cannot exactly explain what that phrase means.

“This book is a ‘biography’ in the truest sense of the word,” he claims at the outset. It is “an attempt to enter the mind of this immortal illness, to understand its personality, to demystify its behavior.” He ventures even farther into the realm of the impossible when he promises to address these two questions: “Is cancer’s end conceivable in the future? Is it possible to eradicate this disease from our bodies and societies forever?”

With objectives so vast, and with such an beautiful title, “The Emperor of All Maladies” is poised to attract a serious and substantial readership. And it is an informative, well-researched study. But it is in no way a biography of anyone or anything, and Dr. Mukherjee winds up acknowledging as much before his book is over.

He points out that there is both folly and scientific partisanship in treating “cancer, a shape-shifting disease of colossal diversity,” as “a single, monolithic entity.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/books/11book.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a27