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    The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery
    Unavailable
    The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery
    Unavailable
    The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery

    Written by George Johnson

    Narrated by Arthur Morey

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    When the woman he loved was diagnosed with a metastatic cancer, science writer George Johnson embarked on a journey to learn everything he could about the disease and the people who dedicate their lives to understanding and combating it. What he discovered is a revolution under way-an explosion of new ideas about what cancer really is and where it comes from. In a provocative and intellectually vibrant exploration, he takes us on an adventure through the history and recent advances of cancer research that will challenge everything you thought you knew about the disease.

    Deftly excavating and illuminating decades of investigation and analysis, he reveals what we know and don't know about cancer, showing why a cure remains such a slippery concept. We follow him as he combs through the realms of epidemiology, clinical trials, laboratory experiments, and scientific hypotheses-rooted in every discipline from evolutionary biology to game theory and physics. Cogently extracting fact from a towering canon of myth and hype, he describes tumors that evolve like alien creatures inside the body, paleo-oncologists who uncover petrified tumors clinging to the skeletons of dinosaurs and ancient human ancestors, and the surprising reversals in science's comprehension of the causes of cancer, with the foods we eat and environmental toxins playing a lesser role. Perhaps most fascinating of all is how cancer borrows natural processes involved in the healing of a wound or the unfolding of a human embryo and turns them, jujitsu-like, against the body.

    Throughout his pursuit, Johnson clarifies the human experience of cancer with elegiac grace, bearing witness to the punishing gauntlet of consultations, surgeries, targeted therapies, and other treatments. He finds compassion, solace, and community among a vast network of patients and professionals committed to the fight and wrestles to comprehend the cruel randomness cancer metes out in his own family. For anyone whose life has been affected by cancer and has found themselves asking why?, this book provides a new understanding. In good company with the works of Atul Gawande, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Abraham Verghese, The Cancer Chronicles is endlessly surprising and as radiant in its prose as it is authoritative in its eye-opening science.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateAug 27, 2013
    ISBN9780804148528
    Unavailable
    The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery

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    Reviews for The Cancer Chronicles

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      A very good primer on the disease. He's very pragmatic, very realistic, and quite explanatory about the complexity of it all, and to what we can probably attribute, and not-attribute, the causes and origins. Johnson also strikes you as the kind of person with a truckload of information on his head. A smart book, written by a smart man. The book also expresses hopefulness in what seems to me to be the appropriate measure. Underlying the surface is the message that it's not your fault, which is the most affirming thought for anyone who suffers, who is, indeed, blameless.
    • 5/5
      This was one of the easiest books on cancer for me to read. I found it informative and in certain ways comforting. The concept that there's more cancer these days because we're not dying from other diseases and that there are dinosaur skeletons with signs of cancer.I was a cancer patient, I was lucky, I responded in a textbook fashion to chemotherapy regime I was put on. My lottery ticked may have been stamped by the glandular fever I had earlier in my life (apparently all patients who have Hodgkins Lymphoma had glandular fever but not all people who get glandular fever get Hodgkins), by the genetics that link geeks in our family with cancer (stomach - grandfather; liver - uncle) or the environmental issues with having worked late shifts and living for a few years in a bustling city centre. Whatever happened I had cancer, some books make me very stressed but this book reasured me that there are people working on this and trying to find solutions to ensure that future generations won't suffer from this.Through the science he also weaves the story of his wife's cancer. Her treatment and the aftermath and the afterword including his brother's cancer. It's touching in parts and you can see his path to try to understand this while his wife is going through all the trauma of treatment and testing and heartbreak. You can see how he's trying to understand this and trying, in the face of a situation where he has no power or agency over this thing that's happening.I found it a compelling read and would recommend it to almost everyone.
    • 5/5
      George Johnson opens his book, on the page preceding chapter one, with an epigraph from Reynolds Price's memoir about his own struggle with cancer that left him in a paraplegic state. I mention this because I was moved by my reading of Price's book almost two decades ago and, while it was an eloquent expression of the experience of cancer it did not, as I remember, inform me significantly about the nature of the disease itself. With The Cancer Chronicles George Johnson, a writer whose book Fire in the Mind impressed me several years ago, shares both the history and nature of the disease called Cancer and a memoir of his wife's own battle with that disease.The history of cancer begins very far back in prehistoric times for it seems that scientists have found that the disease was already present in the age of Dinosaurs. This revelation along with others made the book both informative and interesting to read. His chronicle of the history of the science of cancer explores the realms of epidemiology. clinical trials, laboratory experiments while sharing information from evolutionary biology and other sciences. Even the economics of the Cancer research juggernaut is described -- an industry that has grown to an immense size in the search for an elusive "cure" for cancer.Cancer the disease is at the core of the book and permeates the narrative, but the chronicles reveal what is in reality multiple different diseases. Each cancer affects different parts of the body and different groups of humans in unique ways. This is an important part of the story and represents some of the basis for many of the obstacles scientists continue to face in analyzing how to stop or prevent the disease.Johnson capably personalizes the story with interludes where he shares his wife's struggle with Cancer. In doing this he reveals a view of the disease from the point of view of the everyday person who must deal with the practicalities of diagnoses and treatments and hospital stays. For those of us who have family or close friends who have had the experience of this disease the narrative is a moving personal story. I also appreciated the literary allusions whether explicit, like the reference to Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece Cancer Ward, or implicit. The author is eloquent both in his telling analysis of the disease and in his personal memoir; he demonstrates an ability to convey scientific concepts lucidly enough for the layman to understand. These characteristics and the fascination that the author shares for scientific discovery make this a great book full of insights into the deep mysteries of some of the most complex areas of modern medicine.