Curiosity is Key

“The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day.”
– Albert Einstein

Throughout the course of this book there seemed to be one main theme: curiosity. Extensive knowledge of a subject or process can only get you so far – it’s when you question how far, that true science really begins.

The first breakthrough in cancer treatment began when doctors first realized that some cancers could be surgically removed. However, many patients’ cancer came back, and doctors were left wondering what went wrong. It wasn’t until an English surgeon named Charles Moore began to note the anatomy of each relapse that doctors soon figured out that surgical removal of cancer was an all-or-nothing process. For the first time, 99% wasn’t good enough. You had to remove it all, or the cancer came back.

So, in the spirit of science, a surgeon named William Halstead got curious in order to make sure he cured his cancer patients. I was shocked when reading about his “radical surgery” in which he would remove so much of the cancer and surrounding area that he would often permanently disfigure his patients. His mastectomies sometimes caused the shoulders to cave inward making it impossible to move the arm forward or sideways. Removing the lymph nodes often caused the arm to swell up like an elephant’s leg, which he appropriately referred to as “surgical elephantiasis”. Despite these obvious drawbacks, many of Halstead’s patients were cured of their cancer. Another step in the right direction.

The search for a cancer cure then expanded to include radiation as a form of treatment. As a Chicago physician noted in 1901 “I believe this treatment [radiation] is an absolute cure for all forms of cancer. I do not know what its limitations are.” As much as everyone wanted to believe this was true, a 21-year-old medical student named Emil Grubbe quickly discovered radiation’s limitations. While radiation did seem to shrink tumors, it only worked in treating local cancer and had little effect on tumors that had already metastasized. Marie Curie was another scientist who discovered the limitations of radiation. After being consistently exposed to large amounts of radiation, she died of leukemia in 1934. Grubbe also succumbed to the harmful effects of radiation, and had multiple forms of cancer throughout his body when he died. Willy Meyer, a New York surgeon, wrote in a 1932 letter that, “Cancer medicine has reached some terminus, and a new direction is needed.” It was time to get curious again.

It’s taken a lot of curiosity to get where we are with cancer treatment today, but we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the individuals mentioned above. If there’s one thing I definitely learned throughout this seminar, it’s that you have to ask questions. Ask why things work, how they work, how else they could work, how long they work, etc. Progress is achieved through hard work, determination, and sheer curiosity. Albert Einstein said it best when he said, “The important thing is to not stop questioning.”

Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. New York: Scribner, 

2010. Print.