A History of Illness

Oncologist and author of 'Emperor of Maladies: A Biography of Cancer' Siddhartha Mukherjee discusses the history of cancer in America and his pursuit to find its origin, a disease he says that will without a doubt engulf all of our lives. Siddhartha Mukherjee wrote his book after a patient said "I need to know what it is that I am fighting" and he realized that the public actually knows very little about cancer.

Siddhartha Mukherjee set out to create some kind of order from all of the facts and figures presented, and has mapped out the human cancer genome, hundreds of genes mutated in any individual cancer. In this highly interesting talk, Mukherjee relates his journey to find the first child who received anti-foliates and went into remission from acute lymphoblastic leukemia.