The Emperor of All Maladies

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Folkman’s Harvard colleague Stan Korsmeyer933 found other activated pathways in cancer cells, originating in mutated genes, that also blocked cell death, thus imbuing cancer cells with the capacity to resist death signals. Other pathways allowed cancer cells to acquire motility, the capacity to move from one tissue to another—initiating metastasis. Yet other gene cascades increased cell survival in hostile environments, such that cancer cells traveling through the bloodstream could invade other organs and not be rejected or destroyed in environments not designed for their survival.

Cancer’s life is a recapitulation of the body’s life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own.

“Cancer is complicated,1019 everyone kept telling me patronizingly—as if I had suggested that it was not complicated.”