The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

The swift and decisive victory in the Senate was precisely as the Laskerites had planned it. The cancer bill was now destined for the House, but its passage there promised to be a much tougher hurdle. The Laskerites had few allies and little influence in the lower chamber. The House wanted more testimony—and not just testimony from the Laskerites’ carefully curated panel. It solicited opinions from physicians, scientists, administrators and policymakers—and those opinions, it found, diverged sharply from the ones presented to the Senate. Philip Lee, the former assistant secretary of health complained, “Cancer is not simply an island waiting in isolation for a crash program to wipe it out. It is in no way comparable to a moon shot—to a Gemini or an Apollo program—which requires mainly the mobilization of money, men, and facilities to put together in one imposing package the scientific knowledge we already possess.” The Apollo mission and the Manhattan Project, the two models driving this War on Cancer were both technological achievements that stood on the shoulders of long and deep scientific discoveries (atomic physics, fluid mechanics, and thermodynamics). In contrast, even a cursory understanding of the process that made cells become malignant was missing. Seizing on the Laskerites’ favorite metaphor, Sol Spiegelman, the Columbia University cancer scientist, argued, “An all-out effort at this time would be like trying to land a man on the moon without knowing Newton’s la...