[Note: George Johnson is a friend of mine. That disqualifies me as a reviewer, so please consider this a notice of a book you might find interesting–not a review.]
George Johnson's newest book, The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery, begins, improbably, on the Dinosaur Diamond Prehistoric Highway in Colorado, with Johnson trying to imagine what western Colorado looked like 150 million years ago. Denver was near sea level, grasses and flowers had not yet evolved, and giant termite nests stood 30 feet tall.
"It was somewhere in these parts that a dinosaur bone was discovered that displays what may be the oldest known case of cancer," he writes. From there, he settles in to a discussion of what fossilized cancer might tell us about why some people get more cancer than others. This was seven years after his then-wife, Nancy, was "diagnosed with a rabid cancer that sprouted for no good reason in her uterus and burned like a flame along a wick down the round ligaments and into her groin."
That's typical of the kind of writing you'll find in Johnson's Chronicles. Reflecting on the difficulty of establishing the cause of cancer, he writes:
I imagined an army of clones, genetically identical, going through life under the same conditions in the same geographic locales. They would eat the same foods, engage in the same behaviors, and some would die of cancer by the time they were fifty or sixty while others would succumb decades later to something else.
He can also be achingly personal. "I told myself again that her cancer was not known to be estrogen related, that my not wanting to have children was unlikely to be the cause. But who could really know?" The "best that could be said was that she was a victim of randomness. But randomness can be complexity too deep to understand."
Johnson's precise and moving prose enlivens a sad narrative in which fate and randomness predominate. I wouldn't call him pessimistic, but he does portray himself as an observer who can report, but who cannot effect change. Fortunately for us, the 10 trillions cells in our bodies usually work the way they are supposed to, he writes.
And when they don't, "we rage against the machine."
-Paul Raeburn
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