The Cancer Code

September 14, 2020
Nephrologist Fung (The Diabetes Code) takes a sweeping look at theories of and treatments for cancer, concentrating on three historical paradigms for explaining the disease’s cause. The first paradigm was “unregulated growth of cells,” which, in Fung’s view, didn’t help explain how growth starts, and necessitated physically traumatic methods like chemo or surgery to treat already cancerous patients. The second, more recent paradigm, somatic mutation theory, holds “accumulated genetic mutations” responsible. As Fung explains, this led to the discovery of a “disorienting number of genetic mutations” associated with each type of cancer, and not to meaningful treatments. He holds out more hope for the third, newly developed paradigm: that under conditions of stress, genes that “enhance competition and survival” are activated within individual cells and thus trigger cancer, reflecting the evolutionary origins of all life as unicellular organisms. One day he believes that immunotherapy might be used to track down circulating cancer cells, but in the meantime, he recommends methods to manage risk that include changes to diet, intermittent fasting, and tightly regulating insulin production. While Fung certainly hasn’t closed the book on cancer’s causes or treatment, his explanations are accessible and his work as a whole is intriguingly provocative.

September 1, 2020

A University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University, Barrett (How Emotions Are Made) gives us Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, explaining the origin, structure, and function of that blobby gray mass (50,0000-copy first printing). In This Is the Voice, New Yorker staffer Colapinto, author of the New York Times best-selling As Nature Made Him, explains how this most efficient means of communication defines humans individually and as a whole (75,000-copy first printing). The Dalai Lama's Our Only Home calls on politicians--and encourages the younger generation--to save our planet (50,000-copy first printing). Cambridge historian Falk's The Light Ages shows that the so-called Dark Ages were actually lit up by a keen scientific culture, as universities, eyeglasses, and mechanical clocks got their start. The Kolokotrones University Professor and chair of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard University, public health giant Farmer offers an account of the 2014 Ebola crisis that should be especially revealing for us today; as suggested by the title, Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds, there's sociopolitical context here (20,000-copy first printing). Fung follows up his internationally best-selling The Diabetes Code and The Obesity Code by discussing not just the origin and treatment of cancer but its prevention in The Cancer Code (100,000-copy first printing). Having explored the mental life of octopuses in Other Minds, Godfrey-Smith, a scuba-diving professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney, now looks more deeply into animal consciousness in Metazoa. Barnard astrophysicist Levin, a PEN/Bingham Prize-winning novelist and director of sciences at the arts-and-sciences center Pioneer Works, has the wherewithal to provide a Black Hole Survival Guide explaining the cosmos.

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