Unknown Melancholies

Hello!

I haven't written a microblog in over a week (whoops), so it feels a bit weird writing this. I've been on the reading grind the last week or so. (Is that how you use "grind"? Trying to stay hip and all.)

Also, because I'm incredibly indecisive, today's microblog is going to be a mishmosh of different commentary.

First off, what I really like about The Emperor of All Maladies is that even the parts that aren't personal anecdotes read like fiction stories. The book is dense--packed to the brim with information, but Mukherjee manages to make each scientist stand out and to seem more like a real person than just a name on the page. He throws in little factoids about a great deal of the people he writes about, and it reminds me that ultimately these scientists and activists were human too (as brilliant or as influential as they were). When describing the father of "radical surgery," Mukherjee says that Halsted and his wife "diligently avoided Baltimore society. When visitors came unannounced to their mansion on the hill, the maid was told to inform them that the Halsteds were not home” (64). I found it really amusing that here you had this famous surgeon repeatedly pretending he wasn't home because he was a total hermit. I mean, I totally relate, man. Unfortunately, though, Halsted turned out to be a frankly horrible (albeit misguided) person,

Even if these little factoids aren't necessarily relevant to cancer's history or their work in oncology, it makes these scientists and activists more relatable and more interesting. You root for some (namely literally every female in here because they're all so cool!!!), and you viscerally hate others (*cough* Halsted *cough*). Thus, even though this isn't necessarily a suspenseful book, I hate stopping in between sections because I'm always really interested to see how each scientist/activists' arc plays out.



Another thing I want to point out is Mukherjee's tendency to make connections between scientists and discoveries to past ideas he's already discussed. Not only does it help my (frankly terrible) memory keep everything in my head, but it also reinforces an idea that he brings up early on: science's intertwining with history. I hadn't really thought about the concept before until I read this quote: "Scientists often study the past as obsessively as historians... Every experiment is a conversation with a prior experiment, every new theory a refutation of the old" (93). It's really interesting to see how these scientists build off of each other, how they take work that's already been done and twist it into something new. For example, Louis Goodman and Alfred Gilman at Yale University looked to mustard gas for the next chemotherapy drug, specifically at the gas' Krumbhaar effect--its ability to decimate white blood cells.

That's it for today, so thanks for reading!