The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

But to measure the genius of the Jimmy campaign in dollars and cents is to miss its point. For Farber, the Jimmy Fund campaign was an early experiment—the building of another model. The campaign against cancer, Farber learned, was much like a political campaign: it needed icons, mascots, images, slogans—the strategies of advertising as much as the tools of science. For any illness to rise to political prominence, it needed to be marketed, just as a political campaign needed marketing. A disease needed to be transformed politically before it could be transformed scientifically. If Farber’s antifolates were his first discovery in oncology, then this critical truth was his second. It set off a seismic transformation in his career that would far outstrip his transformation from a pathologist to a leukemia doctor. This second transformation—from a clinician into an advocate for cancer research—reflected the transformation of cancer itself. The emergence of cancer from its basement into the glaring light of publicity would change the trajectory of this story. It is a metamorphosis that lies at the heart of this book.