Intravenous chemotherapy is initiated. The cells in the lung tumor respond. The man soldiers through a punishing regimen of multiple cell-killing drugs. But during the treatment, one cell in the tumor acquires yet another mutation that makes it resistant to the drug used to treat the cancer. Seven months after his initial diagnosis, the tumor relapses all over the body—in the lungs, the bones, the liver. On the morning of October, 17, 2004, deeply narcotized on opiates in a hospital bed in Boston and surrounded by his wife and his children, the man dies of metastatic lung cancer, a sliver of
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