Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Emperor of All Maladies

Over the years we've engaged in many "wars." The War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the recent War on Terror and in the early 1970's, Richard Nixon launched a War on Cancer. It was a war that some said would be won by the turn of the last century. Obviously that war is not won and in some respects we are just at the starting gate. New treatments to take advantage of new genetic research is begging to take hold. The old paradigm of poisoning cancer to death, is finally running it course.

Yet cancer today is growing exponentially. It's estimated that one in three will be directly touch by cancer. It's becoming the number one killer in America. But with all we know, we know very little about this history and origins. Like to many war, we are too often fighting against an enemy we do not know or understand. This was the starting point for Pulitzer Prize winner Siddhartha Mukherjee's brilliant The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.


My conversation with Siddhartha Mukherjee:

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