In 'Cancer: The Emperor of all Maladies' PBS and Ken Burns probe disease's unique status
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Monday, March 23, 2015, 2:00 AM
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JULIA XANTHOS/NEW YORK DAILY NEWSKen Burns talking during a New York Daily News editorial board meeting Aug. 7, 2012.
IF WE can't always beat cancer, says Ken Burns, at least we need to strip away some of its psychological power.
“No other disease has the same impact as cancer,” says Burns, executive producer of “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies,” a three-part PBS series that will air March 30-April 1. It's directed by Barak Goodman and based on a book by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee.
“If you say you have heart disease, which is very serious and kills people every day, it doesn't have the same effect as saying you have cancer,” says Burns.
Part of the reason for this, he suggests, is that pretty much everyone either has had or knows someone who has had cancer.
“It's a shared experience,” Burns says. “It connects all of us in a very visceral way.”
And a deeply troubling way.
“No other disease,” says Mukherjee, “carries the same strong sense of betrayal. Your own body, for some reason you don't understand, is eating you alive.”
What we need to do, they all say, is look at cancer as a serious disease that in an increasing numbers of cases can be beaten.
They also say that contrary to some beliefs, the treatment is not worse than the disease.
“It's a mythology that most people with cancer die a terrible death,” says Burns. “We've made tremendous advances in pain management.”
That aspect of cancer treatment is particularly critical, says Mukherjee, “because it isn't death we fear. It's dying. We can take away the pain.”
Unfortunately, cancer probably won't be cured by a single magic vaccine.
“There are so many types of cancer,” says Burns. “At some point almost all of us may get some form. But we can see a day when most cancers will at worst be manageable conditions not death sentences.”
The book weaves together Mukherjee's experiences as a hematology/oncology fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital as well as the history of cancer treatment and research.[3][4] Mukherjee gives the history of cancer from its first identification 4,600 years ago by the Egyptian physician Imhotep. The Greeks had no understanding of cells, but they were familiar with hydraulics, so they used hydraulic metaphors, of humors, which were fluids whose proper balance, they believed, produced health and sickness. According to the book, cancer existed in silence in history until 440 BC, where the Greek historian Herodotus records the story of Atusa the queen of Persia and the daughter of Cyrus, who noticed a lump in her breast. The tumor was excised by her Greek slave named Demasitis, where the procedure is believed to be successful at least temporarily.
In the 19th century, surgical approaches were developed to deal with tumors. William Halsted developed an aggressive, disfiguring breast surgery as a strategy for removing not only existing cancer cells but also places to which they might have spread.
Leukemia, a cancer of blood cells, was first observed by Rudolph Virchow, and Franz Ernst Christian Neumann localized the pathology to the bone marrow. Leukemia cells are dependent on the enzyme dihydrofolate reductase. Sidney Farber used molecules developed by Yellapragada Subbarow to block the enzyme and destroy the leukemia cells, producing a temporary remission in the disease.
The book proceeds right on through to the latest research and therapies.
According to Mukherjee, the book was a response to the demand of a patient: "I’m willing to go on fighting, but I need to know what it is that I’m battling."[5] Mukherjee states that two of his influences for the book were Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On and Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb, but the defining moment for him was "when he conceived of his book as a biography".[5]
It was described, by the magazine Time, as one of the 100 most influential books of the last 100 years, and by the New York Times magazine as among the 100 best works of non-fiction.
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