A century and a half ago, the list of effective cancer treatments was essentially a single entry: surgery. Today, in 2026, you’d need pages to contain the number of treatments available, and multiple notebooks to delineate all of the various therapies currently in development. It is nothing short of a revolution. Of course, no revolution is perfect, and many cancer treatments are ineffective or carry risks of serious side effects. In part 3 of our cancer series, we delve into all facets of cancer treatment, from the history of their development to how they actually work. Tune in to learn how far we’ve come and where we might go from here in our perennial quest to treat and cure cancer.

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For centuries, physicians noticed that cancer sometimes ran in families, but until the 1960s, an answer to this mystery remained out of reach. Only then were scientists beginning to unlock the cellular dynamics underlying cancer, and what they found finally allowed grief-stricken families to put a name and explanation to their experience. It wasn’t simply bad luck. It was genetics: a heritable mutation in a key tumor suppressor gene that greatly increases the risk of developing cancer in your lifetime, a condition known as Li-Fraumeni Syndrome. Journalist Lawrence Ingrassia belongs to one of those families; he has lost his mother, three siblings, and a nephew to cancer. In this TPWKY book club episode, Ingrassia joins me to discuss his book A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery, where he weaves together his family’s story with that of the scientists who sought to uncover the cellular drivers of cancer. Tune in for a heartbreaking and inspiring journey.

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Each of our cells can become cancerous. It’s an uncomfortable, yet unavoidable truth. Nor is it a truth restricted to our species - cancer is a consequence of complex life. The features that make a cell cancerous are those that, under other circumstances, are beneficial, essential even, for an individual’s growth and survival. How is that possible? In the second installment in our series, we’re putting cancer under the microscope to consider the qualities that underlie a cancer cell’s success in our body. By placing cancer in an evolutionary framework, we can not only understand why cancer is so darn prevalent, but we can also leverage that knowledge to devise new approaches to treatment - working with evolution rather than against it. If you’ve ever wondered why we haven’t come up with a cure for all cancer or why some animals get cancer more than others, this is the episode for you.

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