The Most Powerful Carcinogen Is Entropy

I was at science writers’ summer camp last week (I'll probably write more about that later) when Razib Khan, on his blog Gene Expressions, wrote about my forthcoming book, The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine’s Deepest Mystery. It’s a thoughtful post, and I was particularly struck by his observations about cause and effect -- how the human mind demands reasons, preferably simple ones, even when none may exist. That is one of the obsessions behind Fire in the Mind (the book and the blog), and it carries over to The Cancer Chronicles. When we or someone we love gets cancer, we agonize over the reasons. Was there something we did wrong or that was done to us? When we hear about strangers who are stricken, we want to believe that they ate too much junk food or lived in a particularly polluted atmosphere -- mistakes we personally can avoid. But more ...