kirkusreviews.com
A cancer researcher chronicles the history of the disease and
the prospects in the search for a cure.
A cure for cancer has been just around the corner for nearly a
century but is drawing near, according to this richly detailed, expert
description of the history of cancer, its treatment, and research that is now
producing quantum-leap breakthrough therapy. Kinch (Between Hope and Fear: A
History of Vaccines and Human Immunity, 2018), oncology researcher and
professor at Washington University, begins before 1900 with the brilliant but
mostly obscure researchers who gradually revealed the nature of cancer.
Investigations of bacteria, a 19th-century obsession, were a dead end, but
studies after 1900 found that tiny, nearly invisible particles, later revealed
as viruses, were one cause. Knowledge of immunity also grew, but few associated
this with cancer until after World War II, when scientists discovered that
antibodies and white blood cells normally destroy tissues that become malignant
but sometimes fail. Since the discovery of monoclonal antibodies and cell-based
immunity in the 1970s and ’80s, pharmaceutical companies have been creating
treatments that program the patient’s own immune system to attack cancer cells
alone. This is a vast improvement over traditional chemotherapy, which poisons
normal cells almost as badly as malignant ones. There have also been miracle
cures in which massive tumors melt away, although they remain a minority. More
commonly, the cancer shrinks for a time and then resumes growing. The best of
today’s cutting-edge therapies fail half the time, and serious toxicities are
also turning up. Finally, these “biologicals” consist of complex molecules,
hundreds of times larger than the old ones. Requiring enormous time and labor,
they are wildly expensive—approaching $1 million per course.
As the title suggests, scientists have reached only the end of
the beginning, but the beginning of the end of cancer is on the horizon, and
Kinch’s intensely researched, definitely not dumbed down, and lucid account
makes this superbly clear.
Add comment