Imus Manages Not to Insert Himself into Cancer Discussion with Dr. Sid

To make this interview easier for all involved, Imus proved his broadcasting genius by deciding ahead of time to refer to Dr. Siddartha Mukherjeee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, as “Dr. Sid.”
 
Initially intending to write a history of cancer, Dr. Sid quickly realized that the word “history” was too inert. “It didn’t convey the viscerality, the depth of invasion that this disease has in our lives,” he said. “It felt as if I was not writing about something, but someone.”
 
That metaphor, in his view, is not overindulgent. “It’s a complex biological disease,” he said of cancer. “It has many faces, and people’s approach to it is very different.”
 
Dr. Sid, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Center, knows from whence he speaks. While training to be a cancer doctor, he kept a diary of his experiences with patients. “I thought this book would be a diary of one year,” he said. “But the diary kept growing and growing.”
 
In The Emperor of All Maladies, Dr. Sid takes readers back to the origins of cancer, a word that comes from the Greeks. “Hippocrates looked at a tumor, and he imagined it was a crab—it looked like a crab because the blood vessels of the tumor looked like legs around a crab,” he said. “So he began to call is ‘karkinos,’ or cancer.”
 
Despite its commonness today, cancer has probably been around for thousands of years, as Dr. Sid learned from Dr. Arthur Aufderheide, a paleopathologist who studies ancient diseases, and whose work showed cancer was present in human bodies 1,000 years ago.
 
Even so, the theory that many cancers are related to or caused by modern day environmental toxins is still “absolutely” valid, said Dr. Sid. “The central reason that human bodies are predisposed to cancer is because there are precursor genes that are sitting inside our cells,” he explained. “And the frequency by which these genes can be activated or inactivated can change, depending on the environment.”
 
In fact, what he believes to be one of the most seminal discoveries of cancer biology in the last century showed that cancer is not only an exogenous event, but an endogenous gene that, once corrupted—whether naturally by mutation, by accident, or by carcinogens—gives rise to cancer.
 
“The most obvious thing to do is to avoid the carcinogens,” Dr. Sid said, when asked how one can prevent corrupting cells. The major culprits? “Tobacco, tobacco, tobacco, tobacco.” He also highlighted the dangers of asbestos, and of high doses of radiation.
 
Though no “really, really good” studies have yet proven the benefits of treating cancer with diet, mediation, and exercise, Dr. Sid stressed the importance of an integrative approach when treating and trying to prevent cancer.
 
“This is a disease that is so elemental, you will need to attack it from every single direction,” he said, though he doubts a singular cure for cancer will ever be found. “It’s worthy of pursuing…but there is probably never going to be a penicillin for cancer.”
 
Precisely for that reason, he told Imus, “we need to take all of our resilience, our inventiveness, and mobilize against cancer.” The next big iteration of the so-called “war on cancer” will, in his view, “change the history of our species.”
 
The Emperor of All Maladies is therfore not a sad story. It is, as its author says, “a call to arms.”
 
-Julie Kanfer