Anyone interested in Cancer has to read the Pulitzer prize winning book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. It's one of the most interesting non-fiction books I had ever read and in one of the latter chapters he mentions about the genes which prevent tumors (as discussed in the posted article).
Agreed - utterly gripping history of oncology research for a layman (i.e. me!).
On a side note, I really like his writing style. It's not easy to present scientifically complex concepts in simple terms to someone without a background in the subject matter. This (for me) was right up there with Hawking and Sagan in terms of being easy to follow along with, without being patronizing.
Also, be warned if you're squeamish, the book covers a period in history (before metastasis was understood) when the favoured approach to removing cancer was to just jam the knife in further.
In a sense, this is a military history—one in which the adversary is formless, timeless, and pervasive. Here, too, there are victories and losses, campaigns upon campaigns, heroes and hubris, survival and resilience—and inevitably, the wounded, the condemned, the forgotten, the dead. In the end, cancer truly emerges, as a nineteenth-century surgeon once wrote in a book’s frontispiece, as “the emperor of all maladies, the king of terrors.”
I really enjoyed his style of going back and forth between present time and history. His style of connecting all the dots in evolution of cancer diagnosis and research is mesmerzing. Can't wait to read his other book, The Gene.
Seconded, I just finished this book and it is an introduction to the basic science and history of genetics that reads like a masterfully written narrative. If you have any interest in genetics I think The Gene would be well worth your time.
