The Emperor of All Maladies

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Hippocrates, around 400 BC, that a word for cancer first appeared in the medical literature: karkinos, from the Greek word for “crab.” The tumor, with its clutch of swollen blood vessels around it, reminded Hippocrates of a crab dug in the sand with its legs spread in a circle. The

Onkos was the Greek term for a mass or a load, or more commonly a burden; cancer was imagined as a burden carried by the body.

autopsy comes from the Greek “to see for oneself”;

It possessed a “biological gradient”: the more one smoked in quantity, the greater the risk for lung cancer. It was plausible:

“We have not slain our enemy,897 the cancer cell, or figuratively torn the limbs from his body,” Varmus said. “In our adventures, we have only seen our monster more clearly and described his scales and fangs in new ways—ways that reveal a cancer cell to be, like Grendel, a distorted version of our normal selves.”

Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos.

dasatinib, directly inactivate oncogenes.

Avastin interrupts tumor angiogenesis by attacking the capacity of cancer cells to incite blood-vessel growth. Bortezomib, or Velcade,

blocks an internal waste-dispensing mechanism for proteins that is particularly hyperactive in cancer cells.

History repeats, but science reverberates.