Acknowledgments

I have many people to thank. My wife, Sarah Sze, whose unfailing faith, love, and patience sustained this book. My daughters Leela and Aria, for whom this book was often a rival sibling; who fell asleep on many nights to the mechanical lullaby of my furious typing and then woke the next morning to find me typing again. My agent Sarah Chalfant, who read and annotated draft upon draft of my proposals; my editor Nan Graham, with whom I began to communicate with “mental telepathy” and whose thoughts are stitched into every page. My early readers: Nell Breyer, Amy Waldman, Neel Mukherjee, Ashok Rai, Kim Gutschow, David Seo, Robert Brustein, Prasant Atluri, Erez Kalir, Yariv Houvras, Mitzi Angel, Diana Beinart, Daniel Menaker, and many mentors and interviewees, particularly Robert Mayer, who were crucial in the development of this book. My parents, Sibeswar and Chandana Mukherjee and my sister, Ranu Bhattacharyya and her family, who found vacations and family gatherings swallowed up by an interminable manuscript and Chia-Ming and Judy Sze who provided sustenance and help during my frequent visits to Boston.

As with any such book, this work also rests on the prior work of others: Susan Sontag’s masterful and moving Illness as Metaphor, Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rettig’s Cancer Crusade, Barron Lerner’s The Breast Cancer Wars, Natalie Angier’s Natural Obsessions, Lewis Thomas’s The Lives of a Cell, George Crile’s The Way It Was, Adam Wishart’s One in Three, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, David Rieff’s devastating memoir Swimming in a Sea of Death, Robert Bazell’s Her-2, Robert Weinberg’s Racing to the Beginning of the Road, Harold Varmus’s The Art and Politics of Science, Michael Bishop’s How to Win the Nobel Prize, David Nathan’s The Cancer Treatment Revolution, James Patterson’s The Dread Disease, and Tony Judt’s Postwar. Many archives and libraries were accessed as primary sources for the book: Mary Lasker’s papers, Benno Schmidt’s papers, George Papanicolaou’s papers, Arthur Aufderheide’s papers and specimen collection, William Halsted’s papers, Rose Kushner’s papers, the tobacco documents at UCSF, Evarts Graham’s papers, Richard Doll’s papers, Joshua Lederberg’s papers, Harold Varmus’s papers, the Boston Public Library, the Countway Library of Medicine, Columbia University libraries, and Sidney Farber’s personal photographs and correspondence, shared by several sources, including Thomas Farber, his son. The manuscript was also read by Robert Mayer, George Canellos, Donald Berry, Emil Freireich, Al Knudson, Harold Varmus, Dennis Slamon, Brian Druker, Thomas Lynch, Charles Sawyers, Bert Vogelstein, Robert Weinberg, and Ed Gelmann, who provided corrections and alterations to the text.

Harold Varmus, in particular, provided astonishingly detailed and insightful commentary and annotations—emblematic of the extraordinary generosity that I received from scientists, writers, and doctors.

David Scadden and Gary Gilliland provided a fostering laboratory environment at Harvard. Ed Gelmann, Riccardo Dalla-Favera, and Cory and Michael Shen gave me a new academic “home” at Columbia University, where this book was finished. Tony Judt’s Remarque Institute Forum (where I was a fellow) provided an inimitable environment for historical discussions; indeed, this book was conceived in its current form on a crystalline lake in Sweden during one such forum. Jason Rothauser, Paul Whitlatch, and Jaime Wolf read, edited, and checked the facts and figures in the manuscript. Alexandra Truitt and Jerry Marshall researched and cleared copyrights for the pictures.