From ColumbiaUniversityNews
‘Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies,’ with Prof. Siddhartha Mukherjee, Begins March 30 on PBS
“History tells us where we’ve been, what mistakes we’ve made, what we’ve learned and how that knowledge is slowly being transformed into prevention, treatments and a cure.”
March 9, 2015
(Editor's Note: The first installment of Ken Burns presents Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies premiers March 30th at 9:00 p.m. EST on PBS.)
For much of the 20th century, cancer was a word to be whispered, a topic avoided in polite conversation, its diagnosis a virtual death sentence. The stigma was such that in the 1950s, when a woman called The New York Times to place an advertisement for a breast cancer survivors group, she was greeted with a long pause. “We can’t place such an ad because it uses the words ‘breast’ and ‘cancer,’” she was told. “What if we call it ‘diseases of the chest wall’?”
“In the 1950s you would be confused about cancer because there wasn’t enough information,” says Siddhartha Mukherjee, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. “That has changed dramatically. Today you could be confused about it because there’s too much information, and it’s coming from every direction.”
Mukherjee, who recounted the anecdote in his 2010 book, marvels at how far cancer research and care has come in the five years since then. The book has now been adapted into a three-part PBS documentary that will air nightly at 9 p.m. from March 30 to April 1. Ken Burns is the executive producer and Barak Goodman (JRN’86) is the director.
Mukherjee, Burns and Goodman were at Columbia on March 24 when the University hosted a media briefing on the future of cancer research. Speakers and panelists included Katie Couric, a co-founder of Stand Up to Cancer, and Columbia researchers Kenneth Forde, Stephen Emerson and Thomas Maniatis.
"Many people outside Columbia know Sid for his remarkable book, and now many more will learn the history he's told through the PBS series," said Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger. "We know him as a respected biomedical researcher and clinician whose work whose collaboration with colleagues across the University plays a role in our precision medicine initiative, which holds such promise for cancer and so many other medical challenges."
The main impetus for his book, and the documentary, was to illustrate where cancer research is and where it is headed. ”There’s no better road map than looking at history,” Mukherjee said. “History tells us where we’ve been, what mistakes we’ve made, what we’ve learned and how that knowledge is slowly being transformed into prevention, treatments and a cure.”
Q What compelled you to write The Emperor of All Maladies in the first place?
A patient asked me, “What is it that I’m fighting?” And I found it embarrassing that in 2006, we could not provide patients with a very simple answer to where we were in the war on cancer. So I wrote the book for patients, but I really wrote it for myself, and for the field, to try to update myself, and others, as to where we were.
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‘Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies,’ with Prof. Siddhartha Mukherjee, Begins March 30 on PBS
“History tells us where we’ve been, what mistakes we’ve made, what we’ve learned and how that knowledge is slowly being transformed into prevention, treatments and a cure.”
March 9, 2015
(Editor's Note: The first installment of Ken Burns presents Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies premiers March 30th at 9:00 p.m. EST on PBS.)
For much of the 20th century, cancer was a word to be whispered, a topic avoided in polite conversation, its diagnosis a virtual death sentence. The stigma was such that in the 1950s, when a woman called The New York Times to place an advertisement for a breast cancer survivors group, she was greeted with a long pause. “We can’t place such an ad because it uses the words ‘breast’ and ‘cancer,’” she was told. “What if we call it ‘diseases of the chest wall’?”
“In the 1950s you would be confused about cancer because there wasn’t enough information,” says Siddhartha Mukherjee, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. “That has changed dramatically. Today you could be confused about it because there’s too much information, and it’s coming from every direction.”
Mukherjee, who recounted the anecdote in his 2010 book, marvels at how far cancer research and care has come in the five years since then. The book has now been adapted into a three-part PBS documentary that will air nightly at 9 p.m. from March 30 to April 1. Ken Burns is the executive producer and Barak Goodman (JRN’86) is the director.
Mukherjee, Burns and Goodman were at Columbia on March 24 when the University hosted a media briefing on the future of cancer research. Speakers and panelists included Katie Couric, a co-founder of Stand Up to Cancer, and Columbia researchers Kenneth Forde, Stephen Emerson and Thomas Maniatis.
"Many people outside Columbia know Sid for his remarkable book, and now many more will learn the history he's told through the PBS series," said Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger. "We know him as a respected biomedical researcher and clinician whose work whose collaboration with colleagues across the University plays a role in our precision medicine initiative, which holds such promise for cancer and so many other medical challenges."
The main impetus for his book, and the documentary, was to illustrate where cancer research is and where it is headed. ”There’s no better road map than looking at history,” Mukherjee said. “History tells us where we’ve been, what mistakes we’ve made, what we’ve learned and how that knowledge is slowly being transformed into prevention, treatments and a cure.”
Q What compelled you to write The Emperor of All Maladies in the first place?
A patient asked me, “What is it that I’m fighting?” And I found it embarrassing that in 2006, we could not provide patients with a very simple answer to where we were in the war on cancer. So I wrote the book for patients, but I really wrote it for myself, and for the field, to try to update myself, and others, as to where we were.
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