The Emperor of All Maladies
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer is a book written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American physician and oncologist. Published on 16 November 2010 by Scribner, it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
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118mentions
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2010–2026years
76% recommend24% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- The major reason not to do this is that you often get worse outcomes for patients. Oncology provides a lot of examples where “more knowledge” does not lead to better outcomes. Routine ovarian cancer screening, prostate screens, childhood neuronlastoma screens, and breast cancer screens all have shown that overuse will identify more cancer, but do not lead to better outcomes like reduced mortality.
The reasons are complex, but the short answer is that cancer treatment is extremely hard on your body, and even if you don’t treat, stress can literally make you sick. I recommend reading The Emperor of all Maladies if you want to really get a sense for how delicate the problem of early screening is.
- "The Emperor of All Maladies" by Siddartha Mukhejee.
He is a medical doctor, researcher .. plus writes great science / medical books. This one won a Pulitzer prize. Check out his other books "The song of the Cell" and "The Gene". The books take some work to read but every page is a treat.
- The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer Siddhartha Mukherjee It's an inherently interesting subject but (and it's been more then 10 years since I read it) it's a history of people innovating. I remember really enjoying the way it tries to get at the whys and the hows of people coming up with good ideas.
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 Christopher Clark The origin of WWI is a story that's been told repeatedly. This version is delightfully depressing. I can't quite describe the book. If you say X happening was the fault of everyone it's easy to imagine that's synonymous with saying it's no one's fault. That's not what's being argued - here it's that it's literally everyone's fault.
- The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee.
This book describes how hundreds of people tried (and failed) to cure cancer over *millennia*. It spends a lot of time talking about how the modern approach, which works surprisingly well, was developed by Sidney Farber and others through great effort and a lot of good science.
My feeling when reading this book was similar to reading about the making of the atomic bomb- what happens when you put a bunch of smart people in a box and tell them to solve a problem. However, this time it didn't work nearly as well, because as we found out, curing cancer is an order of magnitude harder than building an atomic bomb. Building the bomb required new engineering, while curing cancer requires new science and new engineering.
- In the fictional corner I must place the Nights Dawn Trilogy and Dune.
Other corners don't really have a best book, for me. Recently read 'Emperor of all maladies' and found it a fascinating journey through cancer, both as an illness and as a research subject.
Also recently read 'The Grand Chessboard' which was also fascinating for a completely different reason.
- No, Darwin never learned about Mendel's work, even though Mendel sent him a copy (which was well after Darwin had published the Origin). The copy in Darwin's library has its pages uncut -- meaning that Darwin never got around to even opening it. Darwin instead believed in blending inheritance rather than discrete units.
As for Mukherjee, while his Emperor of All Maladies about cancer was brilliant, The Gene (and Mukherjee's New Yorker article that he expanded to make his book) has a lot of issues as many geneticists and molecular biologists such as Walter Gilbert and Tom Maniatis pointed out at the time.
