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If we seek immortality, then so, too, in a rather perverse sense, does the cancer cell.
the only way out would be the way through.
Science begins with counting. To understand a phenomenon, a scientist must first describe it; to describe it objectively, he must first measure it.
Every generation of cancer cells creates a small number of cells that is genetically different from its parents. When a chemotherapeutic drug or the immune system attacks cancer, mutant clones that can resist the attack grow out. The fittest cancer cell survives.
Cancer thus exploits the fundamental logic of evolution unlike any other illness. If we, as a species, are the ultimate product of Darwinian selection, then so, too, is this incredible disease that lurks inside us.
civilization did not cause cancer, but by extending human life spans—civilization unveiled it.
blind leading the ill.
The word autopsy comes from the Greek “to see for oneself”;
Life is . . . a chemical incident202. —Paul Ehrlich —as a schoolboy, 1870
Scientists often study the past as obsessively as historians because few other professions depend so acutely on it. Every experiment is a conversation with a prior experiment, every new theory a refutation of the old.
It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.
“I am opposed to heart attacks and cancer,”265 she would later tell a reporter, “the way one is opposed to sin.”
It was like the meeting of two stranded travelers, each carrying one-half of a map.
“Basic research,” Bush wrote, “is performed without thought of practical ends. It results in general knowledge and an understanding of nature and its laws. This general knowledge provides the means of answering a large number of important practical problems, though it may not give a complete specific answer to any one of them. . . . “Basic research leads to new knowledge. It provides scientific capital. It creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn. . . . Basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress.
A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade, regardless of its mechanical skill.”
The iconic homegrown product of wartime American science was, at least philosophically speaking, an import.
Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing. —Voltaire
In the folklore of science, there is the often-told story of the moment of discovery: the quickening of the pulse, the spectral luminosity of ordinary facts, the overheated, standstill second when observations crystallize and fall together into patterns, like pieces of a kaleidoscope. The apple drops from the tree. The man jumps up from a bathtub; the slippery equation balances itself.
One leukemia doctor wrote, “I know the patients, I know their brothers and sisters,357 I know their dogs and cats by name. . . . The pain is that a lot of love affairs end.”
indefatigable
cataclysm
Sisyphus on chemotherapy.
She had been a marine and served in two wars. Even as I towered over her on the examination table, I felt awkward and humbled, as if she were towering over me in spirit.
For her, the struggle with leukemia had become so deeply personalized, so interiorized, that the rest of us were ghostly onlookers in the periphery: we were the zombies walking outside her head.
Every era casts illness in its own image. Society, like the ultimate psychosomatic patient, matches its medical afflictions to its psychological crises; when a disease touches such a visceral chord, it is often because that chord is already resonating.
“In God we trust. All others [must] have data”
In science, ideology tends to corrupt479; absolute ideology, [corrupts] absolutely. —Robert Nisbet
Political revolutions, the writer Amitav Ghosh writes494, often occur in the courtyards of palaces, in spaces on the cusp of power, located neither outside nor inside. Scientific revolutions, in contrast, typically occur in basements, in buried-away places removed from mainstream corridors of thought.
experience, voluminous as it might be, cannot be employed as a sensitive indicator of scientific validity,”
“In God we trust,”509 he brusquely told a journalist. “All others [must] have data.”
And it is solely by risking life513 that freedom is obtained. —Hegel
It is said that if you know your enemies544 and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.
elderly men usually die with prostate cancer than die of prostate cancer—
To put most of the effort into treatment is to deny all precedent.”
Syphilis,” as the saying ran603, “was one night with Venus, followed by a thousand nights with mercury.”)
iconoclastic,
Rose Cipollone found it so difficult to quit tobacco—not because they were weak-willed, but because nicotine subverted will itself.
Suspicion, like beauty,769 lies in the eye of the beholder,”
“All photographs are accurate,”780 the artist Richard Avedon liked to say, “[but] none of them is the truth.”
“If a man die,”784 William Carlos Williams once wrote, “it is because death / has first possessed his imagination.”
a doctor who raves disproportionately about small victories is the same doctor who might be preparing his patient for some ultimate defeat.
When a passerby asks the man whether he lost his keys at that spot, the man says that he actually lost them at home—but he is looking for the keys under the lamp because “the light there is the brightest.”
Temin made a leap of faith; if the data did not fit the dogma, then the dogma—not the data—needed to be changed.
Rous’s sarcoma virus, then, was the product of an incredible evolutionary accident. Retroviruses, Temin had shown, shuttle constantly out of the cell’s genome: RNA to DNA to RNA. During this cycling, they can pick up pieces of the cell’s genes and carry them, like barnacles, from one cell to another. Rous’s sarcoma virus had likely picked up an activated src gene from a cancer cell and carried it in the viral genome, creating more cancer. The virus, in effect, was no more than an accidental courier for a gene that had originated in a cancer cell—a parasite parasitized by cancer. Rous had been
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He had inferred them, as he put it, “as one might infer the wind from the movement of the trees.”
Medicine, I said, begins with storytelling. Patients tell stories to describe illness; doctors tell stories to understand it. Science tells its own story to explain diseases.
History repeats itself, but chemistry, Matter and Lydon knew, repeats itself more insistently.
The smoking-network study offers, to my mind, a formidable challenge to simplistic models of cancer prevention. Smoking, this model argues, is entwined into our social DNA just as densely and as inextricably as oncogenes are entwined into our genetic material.
“Death in old age is inevitable, but death before old age is not.”
