The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

And there's an incredible description of this when the first gases come down and it decimates the field and leaves these men dead. And in the war fields, they'd rain down mustard gas. MUKHERJEE: In fact, what's amazing is mustard gas, which is the sort of definition of war gas, really is a chemical byproduct of a variant of the very reaction that produces a chemical dye. The idea that you can take a chemical and you can attack only a certain organism and spare everything else is of course the beginning of the most amazing idea of chemotherapy. This is the invention, essentially, of chemotherapy. He says, well maybe there are chemicals in the world that only attach themselves to certain bacteria and not to others, or only to certain cells and not to others. MUKHERJEE: And this idea of specificity obsesses him. It is directly linked to 19th century clothing dyes, chemicals that drew the curiosity of a German scientist. Some breakthroughs, over the years, came from unexpected people in unexpected places. Mukherjee traces that evolution in a new book called 'The Emperor of All Maladies.' He calls it a biography of cancer, though it's just as much a biography of our efforts to fight it. We don't exactly know by how much, but on the order of 17 to 20 years. She has psychic and psychological supports, if appropriate, and her life span has increased. MUKHERJEE: In 2010, she avails a surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, targeted therapy.

Even a few centuries ago, she might have been subjected to crude surgery that could have killed her. INSKEEP: In ancient times, people didn't even have the word cancer. SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE: And let's imagine moving her through time, across centuries, and asking the question on what happens to her in 1622? What happens to her in 1722, and so forth? It turns out that her prognosis, her diagnosis, and the way that her disease went changes drastically over time. That centuries old case got cancer doctor Siddhartha Mukherjee thinking. She had symptoms that sounded very much like breast cancer. An ancient historian wrote of a Persian queen who fell ill.

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee