The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Barbara Bradfield finished eighteen weeks of therapy in 1993. She survives today. A gray-haired woman with crystalline gray-blue eyes, she lives in the small town of Puyallup near Seattle, hikes in the nearby woods, and leads discussion groups for her church. She vividly remembers her days at the Los Angeles clinic—the half-lit room in the back where the nurses dosed the drugs, the strangely intimate touch of the other women feeling the node in her neck. And Slamon, of course. “Dennis is my hero,” she said. “I refused his first phone call, but I have never, ever, refused him anything since that time.” The animation and energy in her voice crackled across the phone line like an electrical current. She quizzed me about my research. I thanked her for her time, but she, in turn, apologized for the distraction. “Get back to work,” she said, laughing. “There are people waiting for discoveries.”