This year's Pulitzer prize winner - The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. A fascinating journey spread out across 4000 years - from Egyptian Mummy to Greek queen Atossa (circa 500 B.C) to Harvard medical. This audacious endeavor would make anyone's head spin. Wonder, where these doctors get time to write such wonderful books (Mukherjee joins that elite team of Gawande, Goorpman et al).
The book ends with an open question...
In the end, every biography must also confront the death of its subject. Is the end of cancer conceivable in the future? Is it possible to eradicate this disease from our bodies and our societies forever?
Murkherjee also "predicts" that in the future, this battle against cancer might remain the same - "the relentlessness, the inventiveness, the resilience, the queasy pivoting between defeatism and hope, the hypnotic drive for universal solutions, the disappointments of defeat, the arrogance and the hubris."
In other words, it's up-to that eternal conundrum - human nature, which has the potential to win or lose this battle or make it more stagnant. We simply cannot predict it.
P.S. I wonder, why Mukherjee never mentioned P53 - Tumor Protein 53 in the book?
The book ends with an open question...
In the end, every biography must also confront the death of its subject. Is the end of cancer conceivable in the future? Is it possible to eradicate this disease from our bodies and our societies forever?
Murkherjee also "predicts" that in the future, this battle against cancer might remain the same - "the relentlessness, the inventiveness, the resilience, the queasy pivoting between defeatism and hope, the hypnotic drive for universal solutions, the disappointments of defeat, the arrogance and the hubris."
In other words, it's up-to that eternal conundrum - human nature, which has the potential to win or lose this battle or make it more stagnant. We simply cannot predict it.
P.S. I wonder, why Mukherjee never mentioned P53 - Tumor Protein 53 in the book?
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