The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Mukherjee is a cancer physician and interlaces his own experiences with patients with the history of cancer.  He does a thorough job tracing back its earliest diagnosis and follows doctors through the ages as they learn to identify and name this Emperor of All Maladies.  His descriptions of the different cases and attempts at doctors to save people from cancer read like a suspense novel.

One becomes drawn into the lives that these doctors try to save.  Some interesting facts emerge:  at first physicians did not understand that there could be environmental reasons for cancer and that cancers come from the development of lesions in the body.  

Doctors started to understand this in the 19th century when young boys hired as chimney sweeps in England began developing lesions on their bodies, particularly their scrotal sacks after they hit puberty.  The parts of the body infected were the parts that developed sores from the constant rubbing from traveling up and down chimneys and then became infected with soot.

It took a particularly long time for people to connect smoking with lung cancer.  This seems common sense to us today, but  back then they hardly knew what cancer was and practically everyone smoked, but not everyone developed cancer, so the cause and effect was not immediately obvious.

Mukherjee devotes a large portion of his book giving us the history of the battle between tobacco companies and victims of lung cancer.  It seems the big bad company against the little person is a safe target to vilify.  Too bad he wasn't as forthright about the connection between Sexually Transmitted Diseases and cervical cancer or that HPV is closely associated with anal cancer.  He gives those facts barely a nod while not even including the growing evidence suggesting that abortion increases risk of breast cancer.  I guess we need to make sure we only attack the people it's fashionable to attack rather than informing the populace about  unpopular preventative health measures.  He is, after all, trying to sell a book.

What was most informative was how cancer develops in the body.  The body is amazingly resilient to foreign bodies and even has a back up system when a lesion develops.  He gives an example of someone who inhaled asbestos in their youth.  This would cause a lesion in the lung, but not cancer because the immune system with its back up would only lose one "fighter"against the lesion.  (there's a medical term but I'll say fighter for convenience) 

But say the person also smoked for many years.  This would produce another lesion and attack the back up defense.  Now the body is out of fighters, hence the development of rapidly growing radicals because there is now nothing to stop it.

Mukherjee takes us along with the doctors who, through hit and miss, and countless trials finally came up with the idea of chemical warfare against free radicals as well as radiation.  He describes how these various procedures work.  This is a huge improvement from the radical surgery that doctors employed at the turn of the last century.  Surgeons would cut away almost half a person's body in order to eradicate the cancer.

What they found out was that surgery actually caused the cancer to spread by creating more lesions.

The entire book, while being non fiction, is written in a highly engaging style and is a fascinating look at a malady that has surely affected every one of us at one time or another.

Advice to a Young Scientist by P.B. Medawar

   My vast book collection is swollen largely due to the fact that when I read or hear a reference to a certain author or book on the radio or in the newspaper (I’m a devoted Wall Street Journal reader.  Their book reviews have cost me a lot of money.) I race to my trusty computer and set the search engine hounds on the scent of a particular author and, as often as not, end up buying the book.  (Of course it’s always a major score when the book is in the public domain and I can get it for free on Kindle.)

That is how I came to discover a delightful author by the name of P.B. Medawar.  Peter Brian Medawar was a scientist (he died in 1987) who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960 for his work on graft rejection and acquired immune tolerance which fundamentally contributed to organ and tissue transplants. 

 He is also a really funny writer. (Richard Dawkins calls him “the wittiest of all science writers”- which proves that you can agree on some things with anybody.)   

This is why a non science person like myself came to buy and very much enjoy a book geared towards scientists.

Even though his target audience is young, green behind the ears, science students at the colleges where he taught, his points are written in a format that even the most ignorant lay men (that would be me) can understand and laugh at.

He gives all sorts of advice from “How can I tell if I am cut out to be a scientific research worker” to what to research on; how to equip oneself to be a better scientist; sexism and racism in science; the difference between younger and older scientists, and how to make a presentation without boring the audience into a coma.

(He advises practicing on children, whose attention spans he compares to mice. If they’re fidgeting and crawling all over each other, you’ve lost them.  If they’re still and attentive, your presentation will pass muster with an adult audience as well.)

And he gives advice to the scientists who make up the audience of those lectures.

Scientists should behave in lectures as they would like others to behave in theirs.  It is an inductive law of nature that lecturers always see yawns and a fortiori those hugely cavernous yawns that presage the almost complete extinction of the psyche.

A member of the audience thought to be an expert on the topic of the speaker's discourse is well advised to think of a question to ask in case the chairman turns to him and says, “Dr._, we have just a few moments for discussion, so why don’t you set the ball rolling?”

The person to whom this invitation is addressed cannot very well say, “I’m afraid I can’t-I was fast asleep,” but if he merely says, “What do you envisage as the next step in your research?” the audience will take it for granted that he was. (pg. 62)

Medawar gently guides these young men and women away from the temptation to cultivate an arrogant attitude-especially against older scientists.

He admonishes them to be careful not to assume that because they are experts in their field that they are experts on anything else.  He warns them that non scientists believe one of two things about scientists.  

That:

  “his judgment on any topic whatsoever is either (a) specially valuable or (b) virtually worthless...An attempt should nevertheless be made not to acerbate either condition of mind. 

 ‘Just because I am a scientist doesn’t mean I’m anything of an expert on...’ is a formula for all seasons; the sentence may be completed in almost as many different ways as there are different topics of conversation.  Proportional representation, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the fitness of women for holy orders, or the administrative problems of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire...but when the subject is carbon dating or the likelihood of there being constructed a machine of perpetual motion, a scientist may allow himself the benefit of a few extra decibels to give his voice something of a cutting edge.”(pg 28)

I found his views on religion and God especially interesting. Not religious himself, he nevertheless contends that science is not qualified to make any assertive statement towards either.

There is no quicker way for a scientist to bring discredit upon himself and on his profession than roundly to declare...that science knows or soon will know the answers to all questions worth asking, and that the questions that do not admit a scientific answer are in some way "non questions" or “pseudo questions” that only simpletons ask and only the gullible profess to be able to answer...

....Philosophically sophisticated people know that a ‘scientific’ attack upon religious belief is usually no less faulty than a defense of it. Scientists do not speak on religion from a privileged position.. (pg. 31)

...Young scientists must however never be tempted into mistaking the necessity of reason for the sufficiency of reason.  Rationalism falls short of answering the many simple and childlike questions people like to ask:  questions about origins and purposes such as are often contemptuously dismissed as "non questions" or "pseudo questions", although people understand them clearly enough and long to have the answers.  These are intellectual pains that rationalist-like bad physicians confronted by ailments they cannot diagnose or cure- are apt to dismiss as “imagination.”  It is not to rationalism that we look for answers to these simple questions because rationalism chides the endeavor to look at all. (pg. 101)

An astute observation that I wish Richard Dawkins would wrap his mind around.  It angers me that his books take up whole shelves of the science section in my local bookstore when his writings are philosophical NOT scientific.  Science can only give us the sum of the parts, not the gestalt.  It strives to explain “how”, not “why”.

And yet it’s those “simple questions” that imbue our life with meaning.  Non sentient beings don’t ask those questions.  Or turn to drugs, alcohol, or stay busy all the time in order to avoid them.

This book is short, a mere 100 small pages, but I’d recommend it to anybody science-minded or otherwise.

I bought this book.

Other sources:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1960/medawar-bio.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Medawar

http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/people/medawar-sir-peter-brian.html

Quadrivium: Number Geometry Music Heaven

The Quadrivium was first formulated and taught by Pythagoras as the Tetraktys around 500 BC…it arises out of the most revered of all subjects available to the human mind-Number. The first of these disciplines we call Arithmetic. The second is Geometry or the order of space as Number in Space. The third is Harmony which for Plato meant Number in Time. The fourth is Astronomy or Number in Space and Time. (From the forward)

The Quadrivium is a fascinating book that I came across while browsing a local bookstore. It is made up of six books, each dealing with a different part of our reality as it is expressed numerically and proving how every facet of it has purpose, design and beauty. Each page is accompanied by beautiful illustrations showing the wonderful designs and patterns that are created when tracing formulas and designs of each concept.

Book one deals with the significance of number. For instance, what is one? One is the limit of all, alpha and omega, the mold that shapes all things, the origin from which the universe emerges. It is point, seed and destination. It is God. (pg. 12)

What is five? Children instinctively draw five fold stars. Water itself is an amazing liquid crystal lattice of flexing icosahedra, being one of the five Platonic solids. It’s found in apples, flowers, hands, and feet. Venus draws a lovely five fold pattern about Earth as she whirls around the Sun… Our most universal scale the pentatonic, is made of five tones... (pg. 20)

This book simply amazed me as it showed the connection between mathematics in rhythm, pattern, quantity and relationship at every level: the planets in the universe, patterns in microscopic life or flowers, plants, as well as harmony and music. What I especially found wonderful was seeing how the patterns planets make when moving around each other can be expressed musically-AND is matched in design by the formation of plant life and motion on earth.

Quadrivium was written in a time and by philosophers who saw learning as a holistic process, intertwining all the disciplines and putting them on equal footing-beauty and music with math and science. That’s a far cry from how subjects are taught today. As a musician who fights to get her field respected, this is highly significant to me.

It’s not an easy book to read, but an extremely rewarding one. I did, however, have to laugh at the last section called “Coincidences.” The writer is amazed and perplexed at what he observes. He describes “Sun Dogs” which make up a thin rainbow circle around the Sun. The writer exclaims:

Amazingly, these two ice halos beautifully match the mean orbits of the inner two planets Mercury and Venus seen from the surface of the Earth. This means that when you look at a double ice halo, you really are seeing the sphere of the mean orbits of Mercury and Venus, hanging in the sky. The same two ice halos also function as a diagram of the relative orbits of Venus and Mars.

This is an extraordinary coincidence. What is going on? Every circle fits. Sunlight and ice crystals paint rainbows for orbits. The Sun and Moon appear the same size in the sky. These coincidences are focused on us, here, and now, a planet of conscious observers. Is consciousness also part of the equation?

Plato writes that things are more perfectly organized than we can ever imagine. How do you balance a Sun and a Moon? Would we in fact be living in a conscious quantum holographic universe?” (pg. 350)

Hmm… I wonder Whose Consciousness is at work here?