This number has skyrocketed in the past 100 years - it almost seemed as if civilization caused cancer. Civilization didn’t create cancer, it unveiled cancerĪs of 2010, a quarter of all American deaths, and about 15 percent of all deaths worldwide will be attributed to cancer.I want to share some of the truths about cancer that I found fascinating. I am also in awe of the human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance in our long battles against cancer. I am impressed by the elegance of cancer’s biological design. After reading this book, I am mind-blown by how cancer is so deeply intertwined with human evolution for the past tens of thousands of years.

Before I read this book, I hated and dreaded cancer, because it caused so much pain and suffering in my dad’s family. What is cancer? What causes cancer? Are we close to curing cancer? … This book answered some of those questions but left more open. I started this book with a lot of questions about this disease. Cancer will become the new normal of our life.

That means, every one of us will either get cancer or know someone intimately who will be diagnosed with cancer. Data suggests that one in three women and one in two men will have cancer at some point in their lifetime.

In the past decade, cancer hit our family like a tornado and completely changed the way I look at cancer. A year ago, doctors found signs of early-stage cancer in my dad’s stomach during another operation. Shortly after that, my dad’s two sisters got diagnosed with cancer and went through a long period of chemo (and are luckily now both in remission). Their deaths happened so suddenly and brutally that I didn’t even get a chance to understand the nature of their disease. Colon cancer and lung cancer took my uncle and my great uncle’s life, within 6 months of the diagnose. In the past 10 years, things have changed significantly for my family. It was one of those rare and horrifying diseases that you only see in the movies. When I was young, cancer was such an alien term. Ken Burns subsequently made a 6-hour documentary based on this book. This book is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and named top book of 2010 by a dozen major news agency. It’s a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance it’s also a story of failures, deaths, misconceptions and human limits. This is a magnificent “biography” of cancer - from its first documented appearances several thousand years ago to the relentless battles we have been fighting to decipher, control, cure and conquer this disease in the past century.

The emperor of all maladies book