How we approach cancer treatment matters.

How often have we witnessed tragic events and then, not too long thereafter, heard jokes about those events. What this teaches us is not disrespect, but it continually reminds us that humor is often the only way we can grasp and understand tragedy. That humor and tragedy are, even as Shakespeare understood, two sides of the very same coin.

In the ability to find the absurdity in life’s misfortune, we are helped to see the world as it is, not through the lens of a “reality distortion field.”

Writer and artist Matt Freedman has applied this idea to his own life, his own battle with cancer and graphically details it in his book Relatively Indolent but Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal.

My conversation with Matt Freedman:

The Philadelphia Chromosome

Someday, perhaps 20 or 30 years from now, or maybe even sooner, we will look back at the way we treat most cancers today and be shocked at the barbarism of it all. The surgery, the killer chemicals of chemo, all will be looked at the way we view the leaching of the middle ages.

At the forefront of this transition is a discovery made in 1959. A chromosomal mutation dubbed the Philadelphia Chromosome, that caused a deadly form of leukemia. Ultimately a drug would be developed that stopped the cancer at it’s source.

Science journalist Jessica Wapner has written The Philadelphia Chromosome: A Mutant Gene and the Quest to Cure Cancer at the Genetic Level.  It is both the story of 50 years of the march of science on cancer and also a mystery thriller that lifts the veil on how drugs get developed and make it to the marketplace.

My conversation with Jessica Wapner:

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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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