Summary & Study Guide - The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

By Lee Tang

You will never look at cancer the same way.

This book is a summary of "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer" by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

This book chronicles a fascinating "biography" of cancer—from its first documented appearance five thousand years ago through the battles in the 20th century to cure, control, and subdue it, to a new understanding of its biology.  It recounts centuries of discoveries, successes, and failures in the cat and mouse battle against cancer, bringing cancer research and cancer biology to the lay public.

Read this book to get an informative overview of the evolution of healthcare and health research, in addition to the specific history of cancer.

This guide includes:

• Book Summary—The summary helps you understand the key ideas and recommendations.
• Online Videos—On-demand replay of public lectures, and seminars on the topics covered in the chapter.

Value-added of this guide:

• Save time
• Understand key concepts
• Expand your knowledge

• Language: English
• Publisher: LMT Press
• Release date: Oct 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9780994764072

Lee Tang

Lee Tang is a retired executive of a major global insurance company. Prior to his retirement, he has worked as an actuary, a risk officer and a chief financial officer for several major insurance organizations in the United States, Canada, and Taiwan. To learn more about Lee and his work, visit his website and blog at https://lmtpress.wordpress.com. You can reach him by email at [e-mail].

Book preview

You will never look at cancer the same way.

This book is a summary of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

This book chronicles a fascinating biography of cancer—from its first documented appearance five thousand years ago through the battles in the 20th century to cure, control, and subdue it, to a new understanding of its biology. It recounts centuries of discoveries, successes, and failures in the cat and mouse battle against cancer, bringing cancer research and cancer biology to the lay public.

Read this book to get an informative overview of the evolution of healthcare and health research, in addition to the specific history of cancer.

This guide includes:

Book Summary—helps you understand the key concepts.

Online Videos—cover the concepts in more depth.

Value-added from this guide:

Save time

Understand key concepts

Expand your knowledge

Important Note About This Guide

This guide is a summary and not a critique/review of the book. The summary may not be organized chapter-wise but summarizes the book’s main ideas, viewpoints, and arguments. It is NOT meant to be a replacement, but a supplement to help you understand the book’s key ideas and recommendations.

Title: Summary & Study Guide - The Emperor of All Maladies

Subtitle: A Biography of Cancer

Author: Lee Tang

Publisher: LMT Press (lmtpress.wordpress.com)

Copyright © 2017 by Lee Tang

All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

First Edition: February 2017

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 9780994764072 (ebook)

ISBN 9781543085877 (paperback)

ISBN 9781987063295 (paperback)

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: The publisher and author make no representations or warranties regarding the accuracy or completeness of these contents and disclaim all warranties such as warranties of fitness for a particular purpose. The website addresses in the book were correct at the time going to print. However, the publisher and author are not responsible for the content of third-party websites, which are subject to change.

To my wife, Lillian, who is the source of energy and love for everything I do, and to Andrew and Amanda: watching you grow up has been a privilege.

Contents

Important Note

1. Black Bile in Tumors

2. An Impatient War

3. Will You Turn Me Out If I Can't Get Better?

4. Prevention Is the Cure

5. A Distorted Version of Our Normal Selves

6. The Fruits of Long Endeavors

Atossa's War

About the Author

Chapter 1

Black Bile in Tumors

In the laboratory buried in the basement of the Children's Hospital in Boston on a December morning in 1947, a man named Sidney Farber waited for the parcel from New York to arrive. There were no patients in the lab here, just the bodies and tissues of patients brought down for autopsies and examinations.

Farber was the chief of pathology at Children's. For Farber, pathology was a discipline more preoccupied with the dead than the living. Now feeling impatient watching the illness from its sidelines, Farber will try to treat patients in the clinic upstairs. He would try to use the knowledge from his pathological specimens to devise new therapies for diseases. The parcel from New York contained a few vials of a chemical called aminopterin which he hoped might stop the growth of leukemia in children.

A Suppuration of Blood

Had Farber asked any doctors at the clinic upstairs about the likelihood of developing an anti-leukemia drug, they would have told him not to bother. Childhood leukemia has confused and frustrated doctors ever since its discovery on March 19, 1845, by a Scottish physician named John Bennett. The patient was a 28-year-old man with a mysterious swelling in his spleen. Within a few weeks, the patient had spiraled from symptom to symptom—fever, flashes of bleeding, sudden abdominal pain, swollen tumors spouting in his armpits, and his neck. Bennett treated him with leeches and purging, but to no avail. During the autopsy, Bennett concluded that his patient had succumbed to infection because his blood was full of white blood cells. He called his case "a suppuration of blood."

Four months later, a young German professor at the University of Wurzburg named Rudolf Virchow published a similar case. The patient's blood was overgrown with white blood cells, forming dense and pulpy pools in her spleen. During the autopsy, Virchow found layers of white blood floating above the red. He called the disease "weisses Blut - white blood. In 1847, he changed the name to leukemia - from leukos, the Greek word for white".

Virchow was a pathologist in training. He believed all living things were made of cells. And that cells could grow in only two ways: either by increasing its number or by increasing its size. He called these two modes hyperplasia and hypertrophy. Examining cancerous growths through his microscope, Virchow concluded that cancer was hyperplasia in its extreme form.

By the time Virchow died in 1902, a new theory of cancer had come together out of these observations. Cancer is an aberrant and uncontrolled cell division, creating tumors that would attack and destroy organs and normal tissues. These tumors could also spread (or metastasize) to other parts of the body, such as the lungs and the brain.

Leukemia is a malignant overgrown of white cells in the blood. It comes in several forms. It can be chronic and indolent, or acute and violent. The second version comes in further types, based on the white blood cells involved. Cancers of the myeloid cells are called acute myeloid leukemia (AML); cancers of the lymphoid cells are called lymphomas; cancers of immature lymphoid cells are called acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). The most common leukemia in children is ALL.

***

SIDNEY FABER, THE

third of fourteen children, was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1903. His father, Simon Farber, had immigrated to America from Poland in the late 19th century and worked in an insurance agency. Having completed his advanced training in pathology in the late 1920s, Farber became the first full-time pathologist at the Children's Hospital in Boston. His specialty was pediatric pathology, the study of children's diseases.

Yet Farber was driven by the hunger to treat patients. Sitting in his basement laboratory one day in the summer of 1947, he was inspired to focus his attention on the oldest and most hopeless variants of leukemia—childhood leukemia. The disease had been analyzed and classified meticulously, but with no therapeutic or practical advances.

The package from New York was waiting in the laboratory that December morning. As he pulled out the vials of chemicals from the package, he was throwing open a new way of thinking about cancer.

A Monster More Insatiable Than the Guillotine

Sydney Farber's package of