Two-hit hypothesis: the notion that for tumor suppressor genes, both functionally intact copies of the gene must be inactivated in order for a cell to progress toward cancer.
Virus: A microorganism that is incapable of reproducing by itself, but capable of creating progeny once it has infected a cell. Viruses come in diverse forms, including DNA viruses and RNA viruses. Viruses possess a core of either DNA or RNA, coated with proteins, and can be bound by an outer membrane made of lipids and proteins.
Selected Bibliography
Absolon, Karel B. Surgeon’s Surgeon: Theodor Billroth, 1829–1894. Kansas: Coronado Press, 1979.
Airley, Rachel. Cancer Chemotherapy: Basic Science to the Clinic. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2009.
Alberts, Bruce. Molecular Biology of the Cell. London: Garland Science, 2008.
Alsop, Stewart. Stay of Execution: A Sort of Memoir. New York: Lippincott, 1973.
Altman, Roberta. Waking Up, Fighting Back: The Politics of Breast Cancer. New York: Little, Brown, 1996.
Angier, Natalie. Natural Obsessions: Striving to Unlock the Deepest Secrets of the Cancer Cell. New York: Mariner Books, 1999.
Archives Program of Children’s Hospital Boston, Children’s Hospital Boston. Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2005.
Aufderheide, Arthur. The Scientific Study of Mummies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Austoker, Joan. A History of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund 1902–1986. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Baillie, Matthew. The Morbid Anatomy of Some of the Most Important Parts of the Human Body. Walpole, N.H.: Thomas & Thomas, 1808.
Baillie, Matthew, and James Wardrop, ed. The Works of Matthew Baillie, M.D.: To Which Is Prefixed an Account of His Life. Vol. 1. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1825.
Ballance, Charles Alfred. A Glimpse into the History of the Surgery of the Brain. New York: Macmillan, 1922.
Bazell, Robert. Her-2: The Making of Herceptin, a Revolutionary Treatment for Breast Cancer. New York: Random House, 1998.
Billings, John Shaw. The History and Literature of Surgery. Philadelphia: Lea Bros., 1885.
Bishop, J. Michael. How to Win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Bliss, Michael. Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Blumberg, Baruch S. Hepatitis B: The Hunt for a Killer Virus. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Boveri, Theodor. Concerning the Origin of Malignant Tumours by Theodor Boveri. New York: Cold Spring Harbor Press, 2006.
Brandt, Allan M., The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America. New York: Basic Books, 2007.
Breasted, James Henry. The Edwin Smith Papyrus: Some Preliminary Observations. Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, Édouard Champion, 1922.
Broyard, Anatole. Intoxicated by My Illness and Other Writings on Life and Death. New York: C. Potter, 1992.
Bunz, Fred. Principles of Cancer Genetics. New York: Springer, 2008.
Burjet, W. C., ed. Surgical Papers by William Stewart Halsted. 2 Vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1924.
Cairns, John. Cancer: Science and Society. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1979.
———. Matters of Life and Death: Perspectives on Public Health, Molecular Biology, Cancer, and the Prospects for the Human Race. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Cantor, David. Cancer in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Boston: Lothrop, 1898.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. New York: Mariner Books, 2002.
Chung, Daniel C., and Daniel A. Haber. Principles of Clinical Cancer Genetics: A Handbook from the Massachusetts General Hospital. New York: Springer, 2010.
Cooper, Geoffrey M., Rayla Greenberg Temin, and Bill Sugden, eds. The DNA Provirus: Howard Temin’s Scientific Legacy. Washington, D.C.: ASM Press, 1995.
Criles, George. Cancer and Common Sense. New York: Viking Press, 1955.
DeGregorio, Michael W., and Valerie J. Wiebe. Tamoxifen and Breast Cancer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
de Moulin, Daniel. A Short History of Breast Cancer. Boston: M. Nijhoff, 1983.
de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. New York: Penguin, 2003.
Diamond, Louis Klein. Reminiscences of Louis K. Diamond: Oral. Interview transcript. New York: Columbia University, 1990.
Edson, Margaret. Wit. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1999.
Ellis, Harold. A History of Surgery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Faguet, Guy. The War on Cancer: An Anatomy of Failure. Dordecht: Springer, 2008.
Farber, Sidney. The Postmortem Examination. Springfield, Ill.: C. C. Thomas, 1937.
Finkel, Madelon L. Understanding the Mammography Controversy: Science, Politics, and Breast Cancer Screening. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2005.
Fujimura, Joan H. Crafting Science: A Sociohistory of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Galen. On Diseases and Symptoms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
———. On the Natural Faculties. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, 2004.
———. Selected Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Garb, Solomon. Cure for Cancer: A National Goal. New York: Springer, 1968.
Goodman, Jordan, and Vivien Walsh. Story of Taxol: Nature and Politics in the Pursuit of an Anti-Cancer Drug. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Gunther, John. Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker. New York: Harper, 1960.
Haagenson, Cushman Davis. Diseases of the Breast. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Company, 1974.
Haddow, Alexander, Herman M. Kalckar, and Otto Warburg. On Cancer and Hormones: Essays in Experimental Biology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Hall, Steven S. Invisible Frontiers: The Race to Synthesize a Human Gene. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987.
Henig, Robin Marantz. The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics. New York: Mariner Books, 2001.
Hill, John. Cautions against the Immoderate Use of Snuff. London: R. Baldwin and J. Jackson, 1761.
Hilts, Philip J. Protecting America’s Health: The FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation. New York: Knopf, 2003.
Huggins, Charles. Frontiers of Mammary Cancer. Glasgow: Jackson, 1961.
ICON Health Publications. Gleevec: A Medical Dictionary, Bibliography, and Annotated Research Guide. Logan, Utah: ICON Health, 2004.
Imber, Gerald. Genius on the Edge: The Bizarre Double Life of Dr. William Stewart Halsted. New York: Kaplan, 2010.
Jencks, Maggie Keswick. A View from the Front Line. London, 1995.
Jordan, V. C. Tamoxifen, a Guide for Clinicians and Patients. Huntington, N.Y.: PRR, 1996.
Justman, Stewart. Seeds of Mortality: The Public and Private Worlds of Cancer. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003.
Kannel, William B., and Tavia Gordon. The Framingham Study: An Epidemiological Investigation of Cardiovascular Disease. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, National Institutes of Health, 1968.
Kaplan, Henry. Hodgkin’s Disease. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.
Kleinman, Arthur. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books, 1988.
Kluger, Richard. Ashes to Ashes. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
Knapp, Richard B. Gift of Surgery to Mankind: A History of Modern Anesthesiology. Springfield, Ill.: C. C. Thomas, 1983.
Knight, Nancy, and J. Frank Wilson. The Early Years of Radiation Therapy: A History of the Radiological Sciences, Radiation Oncology. Reston, Va.: Radiological Centennial, 1996.
Kushner, Rose. Why Me?. Philadelphia: Saunders Press, 1982.
Kyvig, David E. Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1940: How Americans Lived Through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004.
Laszlo, John. The Cure of Childhood Leukemia: Into the Age of Miracles. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
Leopold, Ellen. A Darker Ribbon: Breast Cancer, Women, and Their Doctors in the Twentieth Century. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.
Lerner, Barron H. The Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear, and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Levi, Primo. Survival at Auschwitz: If This Is a Man. Phoenix, Ariz.: Orion Press, 2008.
Lewison, Edward. Breast Cancer: Its Diagnosis and Treatment. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins Company, 1955.
Lock, Stephen, Lois A. Reynolds, and E. M. Tansey, eds. Ashes to Ashes. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 1998.
Love, Susan M. Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book. New York: Random House, 1995.
MacCallum, W. G., and W. H. Welch. William Stewart Halsted, Surgeon. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, 2008.
Marquardt, Martha. Paul Ehrlich. New York: Schuman, 1951.
McKelvey, Maureen D. Evolutionary Innovations: The Business of Biotechnology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Moss, Ralph W. The Cancer Syndrome. New York: Grove Press, 1980.
Mueller, Charles Barber. Evarts A. Graham: The Life, Lives, and Times of the Surgical Spirit of St. Louis. Hamilton, Ont., Can.: BC Decker, Inc., 2002.
Nathan, David G. The Cancer Treatment Revolution: How Smart Drugs and Other New Therapies Are Renewing Our Hope and Changing the Face of Medicine. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2007.
Nuland, Sherwin B. Doctors: The Biography of Medicine. New York: Knopf, 1988.
Olson, James S. Bathsheba’s Breast: Women, Cancer, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
———. History of Cancer: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.
Oshinski, David M. Polio: An American Story. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Parker, George. The Early History of Surgery in Great Britain: Its Organization and Development. London: Black, 1920.
Patterson, James T. The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Porter, Roy, ed. The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Pott, Percivall, and James Earle. The Chirurgical Works of Percivall Pott, F.R.S., Surgeon to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, a New Edition, with His Last Corrections, to Which Are Added, a Short Account of the Life of the Author, a Method of Curing the Hydrocele by Injection, and Occasional Notes and Observations, by Sir James Earle, F.R.S., Surgeon Extraordinary to the King. London: Wood and Innes, 1808.
Rather, L. J. Genesis of Cancer: A Study in the History of Ideas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
Reid, Robert William. Marie Curie. New York: Collins, 1974.
Resnik, Susan. Blood Saga: Hemophilia, AIDS, and the Survival of a Community. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Retsas, Spyros, ed. Palaeo-oncology: The Antiquity of Cancer. London: Farrand Press, 1986.
Rettig, Richard, Peter D. Jacobson, Cynthia M. Farquhar, and Wade M. Aubry. False Hope: Bone Marrow Transplantation for Breast Cancer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Rettig, Richard A. Cancer Crusade: The Story of the National Cancer Act of 1971. Lincoln, Neb.: Author’s Choice Press, 1977.
Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
Robbins-Roth, Cynthia. From Alchemy to IPO: The Business of Biotechnology. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2000.
Rosenfeld, Louis. Thomas Hodgkin: Morbid Anatomist & Social Activist. Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1993.
Ross, Walter Sanford. Crusade: The Official History of the American Cancer Society. New York: Arbor House, 1987.
Rutkow, Ira M. History of Surgery in the United States, 1775–1900. San Francisco: Norman Publishers, 1988.
Salecl, Renata. On Anxiety. London: Routledge, 2004.
Saunders, Cicely. Selected Writings, 1958–2004. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Saunders, J. B. deC. M., and Charles D. O’Malley. The Illustrations from the Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1973.
Seaman, Barbara. The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth. New York: Hyperion, 2004.
Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played On. New York: St. Martin’s, 2007.
Skipper, Howard E. Cancer Chemotherapy. University Microfilms International for American Society of Clinical Oncology, 1979.
Smith, Clement A. Children’s Hospital of Boston: “Built Better Than They Knew.” Boston: Little, Brown, 1983.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. Cancer Ward. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968.
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Picador, 1990.
Starr, Paul. The Social Transformation of American Medicine. New York: Basic Books, 1983.
Stevens, Rosemary. In Sickness and in Wealth. New York: Basic Books, 1989.
Stokes, Donald E. Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1997.
Stone, William Stephen. Review of the History of Chemical Therapy in Cancer. New York: Wood, 1916.
Strax, Phillip, ed. Control of Breast Cancer Through Mass Screening. Littleton, Mass.: PSG Publishing, 1979.
Strickland, Stephen Parks. Politics, Science, and the Dread Disease: A Short History of the United States Medical Research Policy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972.
Taylor, Grant, ed. Pioneers in Pediatric Oncology. Houston: University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, 1990.
Taylor, Tanya. The Cancer Monologue Project. San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2002.
Teitelman, Robert. Gene Dreams: Wall Street, Academia and the Rise of Biotechnology. New York: Basic Books, 1989.
Travis, Anthony S. The Rainbow Makers: The Origins of the Synthetic Dyestuffs Industry in Western Europe. Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 1993.
U.S. Surgeon General. “Smoking and Health.” Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, Public Health Service publication no. 1103. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Public Health Service, 1964.
Varmus, Harold. The Art and Politics of Science. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.
Vasella, Daniel, and Robert Slater. Magic Cancer Bullet: How a Tiny Orange Pill Is Rewriting Medical History. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
Vesalius, Andreas. On the Fabric of the Human Body: A Translation of De Humana Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem. Novato, Calif.: Norman Publishers, 2003.
Wangensteen, Owen, and Sarah Wangensteen. Rise of Surgery. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1978.
Weinberg, Robert. The Biology of Cancer. London: Garland Science, 2006.
———. One Renegade Cell. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
———. Racing to the Beginning of the Road. New York: Bantam, 1997.
Werth, Barry. The Billion-Dollar Molecule: One Company’s Quest for the Perfect Drug. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
Wishart, Adam. One in Three: A Son’s Journey into the History and Science of Cancer. New York: Grove Press, 2007.
Wisnia, Saul. The Jimmy Fund of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing, 2002.
Zachary, Gregg Pascal. Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century. New York: Free Press, 1997.
Photograph Credits
Page 1 (top left to bottom): The New York Academy of Medicine; Public Domain; Public Domain. Page 2: The Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions (three images). Page 3: Photo from Laboratoire Curie, Institut de Physique Nucléaire; courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives; ©
Keystone/Getty Images; Boston Herald. Page 4: Courtesy of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation; the Jimmy Fund; Courtesy of the Brearley Collection. Page 5: National Cancer Institute/Public Domain; National Cancer Institute/Public Domain; National Library of Medicine/Public Domain. Page 6: Courtesy of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation/Public Domain; 1971 Herblock cartoon © by the Herb Block Foundation; © Hugo Villalobos/AFP/Newscom.com. Page 7: © Roger Viollet/The Image Works; Corbis (two images); Associated Press. Page 8: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives; © and courtesy of Dr. Robert A. Weinberg, Whitehead Institute; © Bert Vogelstein. Reprinted with permission from Science 318, no. 5853 (2007): 1108–1113, “The Genomic Landscapes of Human Breast and Colorectal Cancers,” © AAAS; Dean Bradfield.
Page xv: Swimming Crab illustration © 19th era 2/Alamy
Index
Abbott, Edward, 56
abl gene, 431, 433
ABMTs, see bone marrow transplants, autologous
ABO regimen, 204
abortion, 199
Achilles, 405
Actinomyces, 122
actinomycin D, 122–23, 162–63
ACT UP, 318–19, 322, 424
acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), 3, 7, 34, 93, 164, 166, 228, 452
brain as “sanctuary” for, 127, 442
cure rate for, 7, 12, 104, 170, 171, 228, 231, 232, 401
remissions of, 127, 190, 338–39, 400, 448–49
research consortium for, 130–31, 133, 144
6-MP and, 92, 338
acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL), 407–10
Adams, Jim, 113
adenoma, 385
Adriamycin, 127, 206, 427–28
affluent society, 23
Africa, sub-Saharan, 175
age, cancer as related to, 6, 44, 230, 300–303
age-adjusting, of mortality rates, 230–31, 232–33, 330
AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), 182
as metaphor for social and political ills, 316
naming of, 14
1980s epidemic of, 165, 315–19
oncologists and, 316–17