Dr. Folkman's War: Angiogenesis and the Struggle to Defeat Cancer [Paperback]
Author: Robert Cooke | Language: English | ISBN: 0812974840 | Format: PDF, EPUB
Dr. Folkman's War: Angiogenesis and the Struggle to Defeat Cancer
Direct download links available Dr. Folkman's War: Angiogenesis and the Struggle to Defeat Cancer [Paperback] from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link
Direct download links available Dr. Folkman's War: Angiogenesis and the Struggle to Defeat Cancer [Paperback] from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link
In 1961, twenty-eight-year-old Dr. Judah Folkman saw something while doing medical research in a United
States navy lab that gave him the first glimmering of a wild, inspired hunch. What if cancerous tumors, in order to expand, needed to trigger the growth of new blood vessels to feed themselves? And if that was true, what if a way could be found to stop that growth? Could cancers be starved to death? Dr. Folkman had ample reason to be self confident — second in his class at Harvard Medical School, he was already considered one of the most promising doctors of his generation. But even he never guessed that his idea would eventually grow into a multibillion-dollar industry that is now racing through human trials with drugs that show unparalleled promise of being able to control cancer, as well as other deadly diseases.
For the creation of this book, Dr. Judah Folkman cooperated fully and exclusively with acclaimed science writer Robert Cooke. He granted Cooke unlimited interviews, showed him diaries and personal papers, and threw open the doors of his lab. The result is an astonishingly rich and candid chronicle of one of the most significant medical discoveries of our time and of the man whose vision and persistence almost single-handedly has made it possible.
Dr. Folkman's radical new way of thinking about cancer was once considered preposterous. So little was known about how cancer spreads and how blood vessels grow that he wasn't even taken seriously enough to be considered a heretic. Other doctors shook their heads at the waste of a great mind, and ambitious young medical researchers were told that accepting a position in Folkman's lab would be the death of their careers. Now, though, the overwhelming majority of experts believes that the day will soon come when antiangiogenesis therapy supplants the current more toxic and less-effective treatments — chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery-as the preferred method of treatment for cancer in patients around the world, and Dr. Folkman's breakthrough will come to be taken for granted the way we now take for granted the polio vaccine and antibiotics.
Dr. Folkman's War brilliantly describes how high the odds are against success in medical research, how vicious the competition for grants, how entrenched the skepticism about any genuinely original thinking, how polluted by politics and commerce the process of getting medicine into patients' hands. But it also depicts with rare power how exalted a calling medicine can be and how for the rare few—the brilliant, the tireless, and the lucky — the results of success can be world-changing.
From the Hardcover edition.
Direct download links available for Dr. Folkman's War: Angiogenesis and the Struggle to Defeat Cancer [Paperback] States navy lab that gave him the first glimmering of a wild, inspired hunch. What if cancerous tumors, in order to expand, needed to trigger the growth of new blood vessels to feed themselves? And if that was true, what if a way could be found to stop that growth? Could cancers be starved to death? Dr. Folkman had ample reason to be self confident — second in his class at Harvard Medical School, he was already considered one of the most promising doctors of his generation. But even he never guessed that his idea would eventually grow into a multibillion-dollar industry that is now racing through human trials with drugs that show unparalleled promise of being able to control cancer, as well as other deadly diseases.
For the creation of this book, Dr. Judah Folkman cooperated fully and exclusively with acclaimed science writer Robert Cooke. He granted Cooke unlimited interviews, showed him diaries and personal papers, and threw open the doors of his lab. The result is an astonishingly rich and candid chronicle of one of the most significant medical discoveries of our time and of the man whose vision and persistence almost single-handedly has made it possible.
Dr. Folkman's radical new way of thinking about cancer was once considered preposterous. So little was known about how cancer spreads and how blood vessels grow that he wasn't even taken seriously enough to be considered a heretic. Other doctors shook their heads at the waste of a great mind, and ambitious young medical researchers were told that accepting a position in Folkman's lab would be the death of their careers. Now, though, the overwhelming majority of experts believes that the day will soon come when antiangiogenesis therapy supplants the current more toxic and less-effective treatments — chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery-as the preferred method of treatment for cancer in patients around the world, and Dr. Folkman's breakthrough will come to be taken for granted the way we now take for granted the polio vaccine and antibiotics.
Dr. Folkman's War brilliantly describes how high the odds are against success in medical research, how vicious the competition for grants, how entrenched the skepticism about any genuinely original thinking, how polluted by politics and commerce the process of getting medicine into patients' hands. But it also depicts with rare power how exalted a calling medicine can be and how for the rare few—the brilliant, the tireless, and the lucky — the results of success can be world-changing.
From the Hardcover edition.
- Paperback: 392 pages
- Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (February 6, 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0812974840
- ISBN-13: 978-0812974843
- Product Dimensions: 0.9 x 5.9 x 8.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,398,727 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
This book clearly deserves many more than five stars.
Dr. Folkman's War contains many valuable insights including how to: Raise children to be outstanding people; be an astute observer about nature to unlock new lessons; pioneer in a new field of science; and be persistent about something important. When the history of medicine in the twentieth century is written, Dr. Judah Folkman will be considered one of the most important figures. This book is the most accessible and complete source of information about his remarkable life and accomplishments.
Dr. Folkman's research to date "has found applications in twenty-six diseases as varied as cancer, diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, psoriasis, arthritis, and endometriosis." "Ordinarily, researchers working in any of these fields do not communicate with each other."
Angiogenesis looks at the way that capillaries are formed in response to the body's biochemistry to help and harm health. Tumors depend on this action to get the blood supply they need to grow. Wounds also rely on a similar mechanism to grow scar tissue.
I have been following Dr. Folkman's career for over twenty-five years, and heard him speak about angiogenesis just a little over two years ago. Because I felt I was well-informed, I almost skipped this book. That would have been a major mistake on my part. Dr. Folkman's War contained much new and interesting information that helped me to better understand the lessons of Dr. Folkman's life, as well as the future implications of angiogenesis.
Unknown to me, Dr. Folkman had also played a role as an innovator in implantable pacemakers, time-released drug implants, and specialized types of heart surgery before he began his serious assault on angiogenesis.
Robert Cooke does an amazing job of rendering what could have been a dense scientific discussion of anti-angiogenesis and its role in treating cancer, into an engaging and meaningful discussion that someone without a medical background can easily understand. Cooke aptly chronicles Folkman's career ups and downs, and ably captures the doctor's frustration of being a scientist two decades ahead of his time.
The real message in this book, however, is one of triumph in the face of scorn and ridicule. That Folkman's peers - be they colleagues at Boston's Children's Hospital who sought to have him ousted from his position as Chief of Surgery or to have his laboratory closed, or the anonymous reviewers at the medical journals where he submitted his papers describing his thoughts and findings in anti-angiogenesis who refused to publish his work finding it too implausible, or the conference attendees who would simply walk out of one of his scientific lectures thinking he was a crackpot - could subject him to so much difficulty in pursuing his scientific vision speaks volumes about how we, even in this modern era when we are supposedly more open minded, have trouble dealing with a visionary. Most of us, in Folkman's shoes, would have moved on to something else.
Now that Folkman's ideas have come of age - science finally possesses the tools to validate his work and we are seeing the fruits in clinical trials around the country - I truly hope that his early critics will have the courage to acknowledge their error. As Cooke reminds us, genius can be very hard to recognize. Now that it is upon us, however, shame on those who continue to diminish it.
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