The previous director of the National Cancer Institute wanted to banish suffering and death from cancer by 2015. Current director Harold Varmus says this claim was not based on reality, but huge strides in prevention, detection, and treatment are being made.
Seemingly every year there are new reports that something we consume or use on a daily basis is carcinogenic. But what exactly does that mean on a biological level?
The Cancer Genome Atlas project, already several years underway, is transforming the way scientists think about and treat cancer.
Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction, and The Laws of Medicine. He is the editor of Best Science Writing 2013. Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. He has published articles in Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Cell. He lives in New York with his wife and daughters.
