I Read 12 Books During 12 Weeks Of Lockdown — Here Are The Best Bits
(crossposted from my blog https://jenglert.gitlab.io/, check it out for more posts and join the RSS / mailing list if you want)
Lifespan
Why We Age-and Why We Don’t Have To
by David A. Sinclair
432 pages
Published September 10th 2019 by Atria Books
Best quotes:
We’re dying slowly and painfully. People in rich countries often spend a decade or more suffering through illness after illness at the ends of their lives. We think this is normal. As lifespans continue to increase in poorer nations, this will become the fate of billions of additional people. Our successes in extending life, the surgeon and doctor Atul Gawande has noted, have had the effect of “making mortality a medical experience.”
“Might we be cheating ourselves,” the council asked, “by departing from the contour and constraint of natural life (our frailty and finitude), which serve as a lens for a larger vision that might give all of life coherence and sustaining significance?” Oh, for goodness’ sake, if we truly believed that frailty was a requisite for meaningful life, we’d never mend a broken bone, vaccinate against polio, or encourage women to stave off osteoporosis by maintaining adequate calcium levels and exercising.
The momentum makes the future I have described, or one close to it, unstoppable. Prolonged healthspans are inevitable. More and more people recognize this every day, and they want in. Because no matter what people say or believe, whether they are optimists or scaremongers, scientists or bioethicists, there is change in the air.
Juvenescence
Investing in the Age of Longevity
https://www.juvenescence-book.com/
by Jim Mellon, Al Chalabi
250 pages
Published October 25th 2017 by Fruitful Publications
Best quotes:
WHAT IS AGEING AND CAN IT BE SLOWED, REVERSED OR ELIMINATED? The short answers: it’s bad, maybe, possibly, and probably not! So a bridge is being built to “carry” us into another two or three decades of life. Built on existing and foreseeable technologies, this construct will buy us the time we need until the arrival of even more revolutionary technologies which will be based around the manipulation of our fundamental biological structure
In summary, everyone will need to work and save for longer. The coming increase in life expectancy will change many societal constructs, including the age at which people have children, the number of children that they have, the nature of work itself, the concept of retirement, the current way in which education is organised and of course, the amount of our leisure time. Older people will be much more highly valued in the workforce, the jobs of the future will be in human-to-human connection (and there will be plenty of them) and the key industries of the future, which will require people as well as computers, will be in the caring, parts of healthcare, travel, hospitality and education
No subject has intrigued us as much as this one; the science of what is commonly known as longevity. Not only do most people want to live longer, but they are going to need more economic fuel (a.k.a. savings) to keep them going as their life extends to a far-off horizon. With a market defined only by the size of the world’s population, and with the science now catching up to the aspirations of life-extensionists, this is truly the biggest money fountain we have ever seen.
Flash Boys
A Wall Street Revolt
http://www.michaellewiswrites.com/index.html#flash-boys
by Michael Lewis
304 pages
Published March 23rd 2015 by W. W. Norton Company (first published March 31st 2014)
Best quotes
The biggest enemy of the speed of a signal was the distance the signal needed to travel. “Physics is physics-this is what the traders didn’t understand,” said Ronan. The whole reason Bountiful Trust had set up shop in Kansas City was that its founders believed that it no longer mattered where they were physically located. That Wall Street was no longer a place. They were wrong. Wall Street was, once again, a place. It wasn’t actually on Wall Street now. It was in New Jersey. Ronan moved the computers from Kansas City to Radianz’s data center in Nutley and reduced the time it took them to find out what they had bought and sold from 43 milliseconds to 3.8 milliseconds.
THE HIDDEN PASSAGES and trapdoors that riddled the exchanges enabled a handful of players to exploit everyone else; the latter didn’t understand that the game had been designed precisely for the former. As Brad put it, “It’s like you run this casino, and you need to get players in to attract other players. You invite a few players in to start a game of Texas Hold’em by telling them that the deck doesn’t have any jacks or queens in it, and that you won’t tell the other people who come to play with them. How do you get people into the casino? You pay the brokers to bring them there.” By the summer of 2013, the world’s financial markets were designed to maximize the number of collisions between ordinary investors and high-frequency traders-at the expense of ordinary investors, and for the benefit of high-frequency traders, exchanges, Wall Street banks, and online brokerage firms. Around those collisions an entire ecosystem had arisen
It’s worth performing a Goldman Sachs-like cost-benefit analysis of this infrastructure, from the point of view of the economy it is meant to serve. The benefit: Stock market prices adjust to new information a few milliseconds faster than they otherwise might. The costs make for a longer list. One obvious cost is the instability introduced into the system when its primary goal is no longer stability but speed. Another is the incalculable billions collected by financial intermediaries. That money is a tax on investment, paid for by the economy; and the more that productive enterprise must pay for capital, the less productive enterprise there will be. Another cost, harder to measure, was the influence all this money exerted, not just on the political process but on people’s decisions about what to do with their lives. The more money to be made gaming the financial markets, the more people would decide they were put on earth to game the financial markets-and create romantic narratives to explain to themselves why a life spent gaming the financial markets is a purposeful life. And then there is maybe the greatest cost of all: Once very smart people are paid huge sums of money to exploit flaws in the financial system, they have the spectacularly destructive incentive to screw the system up further, or to remain silent as they watch it being screwed up by others.
The cost, in the end, is a tangled-up financial system. Untangling it requires acts of commercial heroism-and even then the fix might not work. There was simply too much more easy money to be made by elites if the system worked badly than if it worked well. The whole culture had to want to change. “We know how to cure this,” as Brad had put it. “It’s just a matter of whether the patient wants to be treated.
Black Edge
Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street
https://www.sheelahkolhatkar.com/
by Sheelah Kolhatkar
295 pages
Published February 7th 2017 by Random House
Best quotes
By the 2000s, after years of regulatory scrutiny, most traders had become more careful about sensitive mergers and acquisitions information. The Michael Milken case had taught traders to avoid buying shares of companies right before takeovers were announced; big price movements in stocks right before takeovers were announced often drew the attention of the SEC. Still, investors were desperate for information that might provide them with an advantage, and they went to a lot of effort to get it. Hedge fund analysts monitored shopping mall parking lots and sent spotters to China to watch trucks driving in and out of factory loading bays, searching for unique insights into how companies were doing. It was understood that information already in the public domain, like a company’s SEC filings or earnings releases, was essentially worthless for trading purposes.
Mainstream Wall Street looked at the agency that stood for law and order and ethics in their field and at the most profitable trader they had ever worked with and then pointed at Cohen and said, “We choose you.” “They’re an important client to us,” Goldman Sachs’s president, Gary Cohn, said days after the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York declared SAC a “magnet for market cheaters” and said that the company had “trafficked in inside information on a scale without any known precedent” in the history of hedge funds. “They’re a great counterparty.”
The financial industry has evolved to be so complex that large parts of it are almost completely beyond the reach of regulators and law enforcement. Wall Street’s most successful enterprises are constantly pushing into the frontier; every time the law looks like it’s catching up, they move farther away. There is a perception that in the years after the Milken era, and especially since the financial crisis of 2008, it has become almost impossible, due to a lack of will or expertise, to prosecute corporate criminals who operate at the highest levels. The fear of suffering embarrassing losses after long, expensive trials has led to a kind of paralysis in law enforcement. The Justice Department was unable, or unwilling, to bring any senior Wall Street figures to face criminal charges for the widespread fraud that swept the financial system prior to 2008.
The hedge fund industry created unprecedented fortunes for a new generation of Wall Street traders whose primary innovation was to find ways to make more aggressive bets in the stock market. Cohen was a pioneer, the creator of a trading empire designed to gain an edge over less sophisticated investors. Years later, after paying the largest fines in the history of financial crime-and seeing a dozen of his employees implicated in insider trading-Cohen emerged from the crisis that engulfed his company as one of the world’s wealthiest men. In the end, the evidence against him that the government spent nearly ten years assembling was never presented to a jury. All that was left was for Cohen to spend his billions and to plan for his return
The (Mis)Behavior of Markets
by Benoît B. Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson
352 pages
Published August 3rd 2004 by Basic Books (first published September 18th 1997)
The (Mis)Behavior of Markets on Goodreads
Markowitz pondered: How to translate those two concepts, risk and reward, into equations you can work with? Well, your hoped-for profit-the expected return-depends on what you think the stock price most likely will be when it comes time to sell. “Most likely,” if you go back to the familiar bell curve, would mean the average, or mean, of all the prices you expect it might hit before you sell. Risk is more difficult to define. Perhaps, he thought, risk depends on how much the stock price swings up or down around the mean-or, to put it another way, the odds that you guessed wrong about the final price. Again, back to the bell curve: The most common measures of volatility are called variance and standard deviation; the latter is just the square root of the former.
And his ideas spread. They had practical appeal. Markowitz was saying that the prospects for every stock can be described by just two numbers, the reward and the risk-or, mathematically speaking, the mean and the variance of what you expect the stock will pay back by the time you sell
The whole edifice hung together-provided you assume Bachelier and his latter-day disciples are correct. Variance and standard deviation are good proxies for risk, as Markowitz posited-provided the bell curve correctly describes how prices move. Sharpe’s beta and cost-of-capital estimates make sense-provided Markowitz is right and, in turn, Bachelier is right. And Black-Scholes is right-again, provided you assume the bell curve is relevant and that prices move continuously. Taken together, this intellectual edifice is an extraordinary testament to human ingenuity. But the whole is no stronger than its weakest member.
The crash of October 19, 1987, took many by surprise. On one day, the Dow plunged 29.2 percent. Something was wrong: The academics said that the fall should not have happened, that it was a once-in-an-eon event. The carefully designed investment portfolios blew up. The options-based portfolio insurance failed-indeed, it made the market rout worse, as fund managers rushed to get more insurance and thereby drove down prices even further. Later, the financial turmoil of the 1990s reinforced the point: Something is not quite right in the theory.
Man’s Search for Meaning
by Viktor Frankl
165 pages
Published June 1st 2006 by Beacon Press (first published 1946)
Man’s Search for Meaning on Goodreads
On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles-whatever one may choose to call them-we know: the best of us did not return.
If someone now asked of us the truth of Dostoevski’s statement that flatly defines man as a being who can get used to anything, we would reply, “Yes, a man can get used to anything, but do not ask us how.” But our psychological investigations have not taken us that far yet; neither had we prisoners reached that point. We were still in the first phase of our psychological reactions.
Apathy, the blunting of the emotions and the feeling that one could not care any more, were the symptoms arising during the second stage of the prisoner’s psychological reac- tions, and which eventually made him insensitive to daily and hourly beatings. By means of this insensibility the prisoner soon surrounded himself with a very necessary protective shell.
At such a moment it is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.
When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
by Eliezer Yudkowsky
2184 pages
Published March 14th 2015 by hpmor.com & fanfiction.net
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality on Goodreads
“You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That’s not just an arbitrary rule, it’s implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signalling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can’t just visualise a whole cat’s anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the neurology? How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?” Professor McGonagall’s lips were twitching harder now. “Magic.” “Magic isn’t enough to do that! You’d have to be a god!” Professor McGonagall blinked. “That’s the first time I’ve ever been called that.” A blur was coming over Harry’s vision, as his brain started to comprehend what had just broken. The whole idea of a unified universe with mathematically regular laws, that was what had been !flushed down the toilet; the whole notion of physics. Three thousand years of resolving big complicated things into smaller pieces, discovering that the music of the planets was the same tune as a falling apple, finding that the true laws were perfectly universal and had no exceptions anywhere and took the form of simple maths governing the smallest parts, not to mention that the mind was the brain and the brain was made of neurons, a brain was what a person was — And then a woman turned into a cat, so much for all that. A hundred questions fought for priority over Harry’s lips and the winner poured out: “And, and what kind of incantation is Wingardium Leviosa? Who invents the words to these spells, nursery schoolers?”
Harry had always been frightened of ending up as one of those child prodigies that never amounted to anything and spent the rest of their lives boasting about how far ahead they’d been at age ten. But then most adult geniuses never amounted to anything either. There were probably a thousand people as intelligent as Einstein for every actual Einstein in history. Because those other geniuses hadn’t gotten their hands on the one thing you absolutely needed to achieve greatness. They’d never found an important problem. You’re mine now, Harry thought at the walls of Diagon Alley, and all the shops and items, and all the shopkeepers and customers; and all the lands and people of wizarding Britain, and all the wider wizarding world; and the entire greater universe of which Muggle scientists understood so much less than they believed. I, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, do now claim this territory in the name of Science. Lightning and thunder completely failed to flash and boom in the cloudless skies.
It seemed that Harry was effectively an orphan in the eyes of the wizarding world. As such, the Headmaster of Hogwarts, or his designees within the school system, were Harry’s guardians until he graduated. Harry could breathe without Dumbledore’s permission, but only so long as the Headmaster did not specifically prohibit it. Harry had then asked if he could simply tell Griphook how to diversify his investments beyond stacks of gold coins sitting in his vault. Griphook had stared blankly and asked what ‘diversify’ meant. Banks, it seemed, did not make investments. Banks stored your gold coins in secure vaults for an annual fee. The wizarding world did not have a concept of stock. Or equity. Or corporations. Businesses were run by families out of their personal vaults. Loans were made by rich people, not banks. Though Gringotts would witness the contract, for a fee, and enforce its collection, for a much larger fee. Good rich people let their friends borrow money and pay it back whenever. Bad rich people charged you interest. There was no secondary market in loans. Evil rich people charged you annual interest rates of at least 20%. Harry had stood up, turned away, and rested his head against the wall. Harry had asked if he needed the Headmaster’s permission before he could start a bank.
Nonviolent Communication
A Language of Life
https://www.nonviolentcommunication.com/
by Marshall Rosenberg
3rd Edition, 264 pages
Published September 1st 2015 by PuddleDancer Press (first published 1999)
Nonviolent Communication on Goodreads
NVC is founded on language and communication skills that strengthen our ability to remain human, even under trying conditions. It contains nothing new; all that has been integrated into NVC has been known for centuries. The intent is to remind us about what we already know-about how we humans were meant to relate to one another-and to assist us in living in a way that concretely manifests this knowledge
First, we observe what is actually happening in a situation: what are we observing others saying or doing that is either enriching or not enriching our life? The trick is to be able to articulate this observation without introducing any judgment or evaluation-to simply say what people are doing that we either like or don’t like. Next, we state how we feel when we observe this action: are we hurt, scared, joyful, amused, irritated? And thirdly, we say what needs of ours are connected to the feelings we have identified. An awareness of these three components is present when we use NVC to clearly and honestly express how we are.
Pre-Suasion
A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade
https://www.influenceatwork.com/books/pre-suasion/
by Robert Cialdini
432 pages
Published September 6th 2016 by Simon Schuster
The implication for effective pre-suasion is plain: pre-suasive openers can produce dramatic, immediate shifts in people, but to turn those shifts into durable changes, it’s necessary to get commitments to them, usually in the form of related behavior. Not all commitments are equal in this respect, however. The most effective commitments reach into the future by incorporating behaviors that affect one’s personal identity. They do so by ensuring that the commitment is undertaken in an active, effortful, and voluntary fashion, because each of these elements communicates deep personal preferences
In large measure, who we are with respect to any choice is where we are, attentionally, in the moment before the choice. We can be channeled to that privileged moment by (choice-relevant) cues we haphazardly bump into in our daily settings; or, of greater concern, by the cues a knowing communicator has tactically placed there; or, to much better and lasting effect, by the cues we have stored in those recurring sites to send us consistently in desired directions. In each case, the made moment is pre-suasive. Whether we are wary of the underlying process, attracted to its potential, or both, we’d be right to acknowledge its considerable power and wise to understand its inner workings.
The dilemma is easy to see. On the one hand, many business leaders would likely be dissuaded from unethical activity by alarming economic considerations. On the other hand, the cautionary !economic argument against such activity has failed to reduce misconduct because it involves an expectation of discovery, which most perpetrators surely would not possess when deciding to act.
Here’s what we’ve attempted to show: An organization that regularly approves, encourages, or allows the use of deceitful tactics in its external dealings (with customers, clients, stockholders, suppliers, distributors, regulators, and so on) will experience a nasty set of internal consequences that are akin to tumors. Not only will they become malignant-growing, spreading, and eating progressively at the organization’s health and vigor-they will be difficult to trace and identify via typical accounting methods as the true causes of inferior profitability. Thus, they might easily lead to expensive, misguided efforts that fail to target the genuine culprits of the dysfunction.
Start with Why
How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
read The Infinite Game instead, it’s better!
https://simonsinek.com/product/start-with-why/
by Simon Sinek
256 pages
Published October 29th, 2009 by Portfolio
When we communicate from the outside in, when we communicate WHAT we do first, yes, people can understand vast amounts of complicated information, like facts and features, but it does not drive behavior. But when we communicate from the inside out, we’re talking directly to the part of the brain that controls decision-making, and our language part of the brain allows us to rationalize those decisions.
This is where “gut decisions” come from. They just feel right. There is no part of the stomach that controls decision-making, it all happens in the limbic brain. It’s not an accident that we use that word “feel” to explain those decisions either. The reason gut decisions feel right is because the part of the brain that controls them also controls our feelings. Whether you defer to your gut or you’re simply following your heart, no matter which part of the body you think is driving the decision, the reality is it’s all in your limbic brain.
What all great leaders have in common is the ability to find good fits to join their organizations-those who believe what they believe. The goal is to hire those who are passionate for your WHY, your purpose, cause or belief, and who have the attitude that fits your culture. Once that is established, only then should their skill set and experience be evaluated When people inside the company know WHY they come to work, people outside the company are vastly more likely to understand WHY the company is special. In these organizations, from the management on down, no one sees themselves as any more or any less than anyone else. They all need each other. If the people inside a company are told to come to work and just do their job, that’s all they will do. If they are constantly reminded WHY the company was founded and told to always look for ways to bring that cause to life while performing their job, however, then they will do more than their job.
As a company grows, the CEO’s job is to personify the WHY. To ooze of it. To talk about it. To preach it. To be a symbol of what the company believes. They are the intention and WHAT the company says and does is their voice. Like Martin Luther King and his social movement, the leader’s job is no longer to close all the deals; it is to inspire.
The Breakthrough
Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer
https://www.charlesgraeber.com/
by Charles Graeber
320 pages
Published November 13th 2018 by Twelve
Cancer is alive. It’s a normal cell, mutated and changed, and it continues to change in the body. Unfortunately, a cancer drug doesn’t change with time, but whatever cancer cells remain will continue to mutate. It only takes one. The drug dances with cancer, but cancer dances away. As a result, these types of drugs are unlikely to ever truly cure cancer. But we have killers in our bodies, and scouts and soldiers, a dynamic network of cells more nimble than any cancer. This is our immune system, a living defense as old as life itself. This system mutates. It !adapts. It learns and remembers and matches an innovating disease step for step. It’s our best tool to cure cancer. And we have finally discovered how to unleash it. This is the breakthrough.
Seven years later, a more nuanced version of the three E ‘s-elimination, equilibrium, and escape-helps redefine our understanding of the relationship between some cancers and the immune system. 29 Immunoediting describes how the immune system protects and defends the host from cancer, even as it “sculpts” the genetics of some tumors. Those tumors escaped because they had successfully evolved tricks to evade or shut down the immune system-and some of those tricks included taking advantage of the safety checkpoints built into the T cell.
The current understanding, perhaps best illustrated by the 2014 “cancer immunity cycle,” 32 is that while most cancer cells express antigens that T cells can recognize and attack, cancer has evolved to manipulate T cell checkpoints, as well as other tricks, in order to shut down the immune system and survive; if it didn’t, cancer wouldn’t exist. Those tricks can be thought of as a sort of fourth E: Emergency kill switches on T cells (including checkpoints, such as CTLA-4) that cancer cells have Evolved to Exploit. This model helps explain why the immune system-and cancer immunotherapies-had previously failed to kill cancer. As long as cancer could exploit the checkpoints and shut down T cells, immune defense was futile. But now some of those exploits were exposed. And they could be blocked. Which opened the possibility for a hopeful fifth and final E: the End of cancer.
The new cancer drugs with four-syllable names are now products sold during Super Bowl ads, and, remarkably, the new Jimmy Carter drug isn’t new anymore. But the surprise, excitement, and hope surrounding that first breakthrough in cancer immunotherapy triggered a flood of new interest and funding to the field, and a multiplier effect for the pace of scientific progress. The result is what biologist E. O. Wilson has referred to as a “consilience”-an intellectual synergy that comes when specialists from very different disciplines are able to examine a common topic and find a common language to share their ideas. It’s no longer an argument between cell biologists and immunologists and virologists and oncologists; it’s a conversation. For the first time we all glimpse the whole of the cancer-immunity cycle. The blind men and women examining the elephant have suddenly gained sight and can get to work.
The Emperor of All Maladies
A Biography of Cancer
http://siddharthamukherjee.com/
by Siddhartha Mukherjee
571 pages
Published November 16th 2010 by Scribner
The Emperor of All Maladies on Goodreads
This image-of cancer as our desperate, malevolent, contemporary doppelgänger-is so haunting because it is at least partly true. A cancer cell is an astonishing perversion of the normal cell. Cancer is a phenomenally successful invader and colonizer in part because it exploits the very features that make us successful as a species or as an organism.
Cancer’s emergence in the world is the product of a double negative: it becomes common only when all other killers themselves have been killed. Nineteenth-century doctors often linked cancer to civilization: cancer, they imagined, was caused by the rush and whirl of modern life, which somehow incited pathological growth in the body. The link was correct, but the causality was not: civilization did not cause cancer, but by extending human life spans-civilization unveiled it.
Ehrlich’s magic bullets had one last target to fell: cancer. Syphilis and trypanosomiasis are microbial diseases. Ehrlich was slowly inching toward his ultimate goal: the malignant human cell. Between 1904 and 1908, he rigged several elaborate schemes to find an anticancer drug using his vast arsenal of chemicals. He tried amides, anilines, sulfa derivatives, arsenics, bromides, and alcohols to kill cancer cells. None of them worked. What was poison to cancer cells, he found, was inevitably poison to normal cells as well.
By addressing their letter to the president on behalf of “millions of Americans,” the Laskerites performed a tactically brilliant about-face. In the past, they had pleaded to the nation for funds for cancer. Now, as they pleaded for the nation for a more coordinated attack on cancer, they found themselves colossally empowered in the public imagination. The cure for cancer became incorporated into the very fabric of the American dream. “To oppose big spending against cancer,” one observer told the historian James Patterson, was to “oppose Mom, apple pie, and the flag.” In America, this was a triumvirate too powerful for even the president to ignore.
As cigarette consumption escalated into a national addiction, it became harder and harder to discern an association with cancer. By the early twentieth century, four out of five-and, in some parts of the world, nearly nine of ten-men were smoking cigarettes (women would soon follow). And when a risk factor for a disease becomes so highly prevalent in a population, it paradoxically begins to disappear into the white noise of the background.
In Lewis Carroll’s poem, when the hunters finally capture the deceptive Snark, it reveals itself not to be a foreign beast, but one of the human hunters sent to trap it. And so it had turned out with cancer. Cancer genes came from within the human genome. Indeed the Greeks had been peculiarly prescient yet again in their use of the term oncos . Cancer was intrinsically “loaded” in our genome, awaiting activation. We were destined to carry this fatal burden in our genes-our own genetic “oncos.”
Druker’s drug will alter the national physiognomy of cancer, converting a once-rare disease into a relatively common one. (Druker jokes that he has achieved the perfect inversion of the goals of cancer medicine: his drug has increased the prevalence of cancer in the world.) Given that most of our social networks typically extend to about one thousand individuals, each of us, on average, will know one person with this leukemia who is being kept alive by a targeted anticancer drug.
“ Cancer at the fin de siècle, “ as the oncologist Harold Burstein described it, “resides at the interface between society and science.” It poses not one but two challenges. The first, the “biological challenge” of cancer, involves “harnessing the fantastic rise in scientific knowledge . . . to conquer this ancient and terrible illness.” But the second, the “social challenge,” is just as acute: it involves forcing ourselves to confront our customs, rituals, and behaviors. These, unfortunately, are not customs or behaviors that lie at the peripheries of our society or selves, but ones that lie at their definitional cores: what we eat and drink, what we produce and exude into our environments, when we choose to reproduce, and how we age.
Book summaries
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