The World's Best Book Summaries
Can you be resistant to chemotherapy? What causes chemoresistance? Chemotherapy is a cornerstone of cancer treatment even today. Unfortunately, not all cancers respond to the treatment. Chemo-resistance has no single cause—it can arise due to a variety of host- or tumor-related factors. Learn about chemoresistance, why it occurs, and how chemo-resistant cancers are treated.
Can cancer be a social issue? What are the social implications of treating cancer? According to Siddhartha Mukherjee, the author of The Emperor of All Maladies, battling cancer isn’t just an interesting puzzle to solve—it is about helping people. We mustn’t focus so much on the disease that we lose sight of the people. Read about the social aspects of fighting cancer.
Are vegetarians healthier than meat-eaters? Should you stop eating meat? Americans are the biggest consumers of meat out of any country. They also struggle with obesity, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease at an alarmingly high rate. That’s why many are starting to turn to vegetarianism—however, vegetarianism comes with its own set of health risks. Continue reading to find out if vegetarians are healthier than meat-eaters.
How does chemo work in treating cancer? Why is chemotherapy so harmful? Chemotherapy uses powerful yet toxic drugs to destroy malignant cancerous tumors. However, drugs don’t discriminate between cancerous cells and healthy cells, which is why chemotherapy has so many side effects. Keep reading to learn about chemotherapy, how it works, and why it’s so harmful.
What are the hallmarks of cancer? What are the six characteristics a cell has to possess to be considered cancerous? The hallmarks of cancer are the qualities that cells have to possess to be diagnosed as cancerous. The original six were proposed by Robert Weinberg and Douglas Hanahan: 1) automatic mitosis, 2) non-responsive to antigrowth signals, 3) “immortality,” 4) limitless replication, 5) self-sustaining, 6) mobility. Keep reading to learn about the hallmarks of cancer, explained by oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee.
Which genes are mutated in cancer? Is it possible to sequence all the gene mutations giving rise to cancer? Cancer cells are extremely diverse, and finding the exact gene mutations in a cancer patient to inform treatment would be difficult and time-consuming. A much more feasible approach would be to identify and repair the disrupted biological pathways. Researchers believe that the typical cancer cell has anywhere from 11 to 15 disrupted pathways, with an average of 13. Keep reading to learn about cancer cell genomes and pathways.
Does surgical tumor removal cure cancer? Can cancer spread again if tumor is removed? Cancer is difficult (often impossible) to cure with surgery, because if even a single cancerous cell is left behind, it can continue to grow and spread throughout the body. However, surgery can help shrink the tumor if removing it altogether is not possible, making it easier for other treatments to kill the remaining cancer cells. Keep reading to learn about treating cancer with surgery.
What exactly is cancer? How do cancerous tumors develop? Cancer is essentially a corruption of our biological processes. The same functions that normally keep us alive and healthy instead work to build and repair deadly tumors inside our bodies. Keep reading to learn about cancer, explained in simple terms.
What is Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies about? What is the key message to take away from the book? The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee is an overview and rough timeline of the fight against cancer. 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. Below is a brief overview of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee.
What do we currently know about cancer? How has our understanding of the disease evolved throughout the years? Until relatively recently, doctors didn’t truly know what cancer was or how it occurred, let alone how to treat it. Therefore, a great deal of the history of cancer research is just trying to answer those basic questions about the disease. Here is an overview of the history of cancer research, from the pre-1900s to 2010.