BOOK OVERVIEW

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and now a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.

10 BEST QUOTES FROM 'THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES'

1. “History repeats, but science reverberates.”

2. “The art of medicine is long, Hippocrates tells us, "and life is short; opportunity fleeting; the experiment perilous; judgment flawed.”

3. “Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.”

4. “One swallow is a coincidence, but two swallows make summer.”

5. “This was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation.”

6. “All cancers are alike but they are alike in a unique way.”

7. “Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own.”

8. “In God we trust. All others [must] have data. - Bernard Fisher”

9. “In the laboratory, we call this the six-degrees-of-separation-from-cancer rule: you can ask any biological question, no matter how seemingly distant…and you will end up, in fewer than six genetic steps, connecting with a proto-oncogene or tumor suppressor.”

10. ““And it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained. —Hegel”