However, the cancer itself doesn’t kill the patient instead, mutated cells invade vital organs and prevent them from working properly, leading to deadly complications.Ĭancer’s exact effects depend on what part or parts of the body it spreads to.

That’s part of the challenge in finding a universal cure for cancer.Ĭancer is such a frightening disease because, in addition to being hard to cure, it’s often fatal. The author adds that it’s crucial to understand cancer is not a single disease, but a type of disease-for instance, lung cancer and leukemia are both cancers, but they have different causes, symptoms, and treatments. As a result, they replicate quickly and endlessly, eventually amassing in a tumor. Normally mitosis is strictly regulated by biological signals that control when it starts and when it stops, but cancerous cells don’t respond correctly to those signals. Mitosis is the process of cells dividing to create new, identical cells-it’s how we grow and how our bodies repair damage. In simple terms, cancer is uncontrolled cell division. Mukherjee says that cancer is, essentially, a corruption of our biological processes the functions that normally keep us alive and healthy instead work to build and repair deadly tumors inside our bodies. He earned a PhD from Oxford University and an MD from Harvard. Our guide will provide context and background information for Mukherjee’s book, helping you to understand the more technical aspects of cancer and cancer treatment as well as the significance behind major events in the fight against cancer.Īside from the Pulitzer-winning The Emperor of All Maladies, Mukherjee wrote The Gene: An Intimate History, and has also written for The New York Times and The New Yorker.

Though The Emperor of All Maladies was first published in 2010, cancer remains one of the most frightening diseases of our time, and doctors are still working to fully understand and treat it, despite advances in research and practices. Mukherjee, a doctor and biologist who specializes in immunology (the study of the immune system) and oncology (the study of cancer), has spent much of his career on the front line of that fight. The book’s subtitle, A Biography of Cancer, reflects Mukherjee’s feeling that cancer is a living and evolving entity-an entity that fought modern medicine to a stalemate for hundreds of years. The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee is an overview and rough timeline of the fight against cancer. 1-Page Summary 1-Page Book Summary of The Emperor of All Maladies

The emperor of all maladies book review