Reddit reviews The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

I'd also add for a great historical/narrative perspective on cancer, Siddharta Mukerjee's pulitzer prize winner "The Emperor of All Maladies" is a fantastic read.

Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Here's an article from Nature Genetics that may be of interest: A common JAK2 haplotype confers susceptibility to
myeloproliferative neoplasms. If it's too technical, this may be a useful resource.

As for blood and DNA, this information is so ubiquitous I'm not sure if it's worth looking for specific books or articles. The Wikipedia pages look pretty good. However, given these topics, I would like to recommend an excellent book Emperor of All Maladies: Biography of Cancer. As a cancer biologist, I consider it an excellent book about modern cancer biology and history of molecular medicine. It does a great job introducing blood diseases and role of molecular genetics. Hope this helps!

Some good answers have already touched on it, so I'm not going to try to answer your question.

But, OP or anyone else really, if you want more information, there's an amazing book called The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. He dedicates a bit to answering this question. It won the Pulitzer Prize, it's an absolutely gripping read, and is written so someone without a medical background can read it. I've recommended it to everyone I know

If you're a fan of cancer (phrasing!), I'd check out The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. A bit long at points but a pretty cool read

http://www.amazon.com/Emperor-All-Maladies-Biography-Cancer/dp/1439107955

Cancer is just a 'better' version of our own cells. This is the one thing that I don't think will ever be gone. Also, the term 'cancer' is way to broad to encompass everything. We all have a little cancer right now, our bodies are just able to handle and destroy the cancerous cells

We will though have personalized medicine, where your genome will predict what cancers you likely will get, and everyone (pending our health care system) will likely be on a cocktail of drugs to minimize the risks of cancer.

If you want a good read, try The Emperor of all Maladies to learn about how cancer has been with us since the dawn of times, and will be with us forever likely.

He's a fantastic writer. If you are interested in seeing the same treatment he gives to depression, but expanded and applied to cancer, then I highly recommend his book.

I know that this is /science and most of the people in here are way ahead of me on this stuff, but for any other laypeople like myself, reading The Emperor of All Maladies was the thing that finally helped me understand this way of thinking about cancer. I've taken classes on genomes and I have perhaps a greater interest than most people in diseases, but somehow it had never quite been made clear that breast cancer is not just a different kind of cancer from lung cancer, but rather an entirely different beast altogether. For anybody who would like a better understanding of cancer, I cannot recommend that book enough. It's one of the best books I've read in the last five years.

I work in cancer research, and haven't read this book but I've heard quite positive things about it. It seem to be ideally suited for an interested non-scientific audience.

This might be a good start.

The nature of the beast is so complex that about a fourth of us will die of cancer, sadly enough. From your personal experience you might identify with and have a little peace/closure from reading Siddhartha Mukherje's "The Emperor of all Maladies." Don't let the author's name or the genre deter you; this is an intensely enjoyable and easy to follow read. Siddhartha Mukherje has a gift for breaking cancer down into a fascinating personification of sorts.

I just finished The Emperor of All Maladies and just shortly before that Stiff. I really enjoyed both of them! Emperor is a long read, but well written and very thorough. Stiff is a quick, enjoyable read that's a less academic, but still really interesting. I'm about to start My Sister's Keeper. The PI across the hall recommended it. And I'm reading Introduction to Statistical Thought by Lavine for a class. I added a few of the books other people listed here to my to-read list

Emperor of All Maladies

It's kind of like an biography of cancer over the years.