The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

ancer’s life is a recapitulation of the body’s life

If cancer is the quintessential product of modernity, then so, too, is its principal preventable cause: tobacco.

Mounds of bacterial plates had grown around him like a molding, decrepit garden with still no sign of a promised drug.

Wöhler’s experiment demolished vitalism. Organic and inorganic chemicals, he proved, were interchangeable. Biology was chemistry: perhaps even a human body was no different from a bag of busily reacting chemicals—a beaker with arms, legs, eyes, brain, and soul.

If we, as a species, are the ultimate product of Darwinian selection, then so, too, is this incredible disease that lurks inside us.

If we, as a species, are the ultimate product of Darwinian selection, then so, too, is this incredible disease that lurks inside us.

If we, as a species, are the ultimate product of Darwinian selection, then so, too, is this incredible disease that lurks inside us.

confront cancer is to encounter a parallel species, one perhaps more adapted to survival than even we are.

(This was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation.)

Cell division allows us as organisms to grow, to adapt, to recover, to repair—to live. And distorted and unleashed, it allows cancer cells to grow, to flourish, to adapt, to recover, and to repair—to live at the cost of our living. Cancer cells grow faster, adapt better. They are more perfect versions of ourselves.