Cancer biology and its treatment — the hallmarks, staging, and the shift from cytotoxic to targeted therapy.
12 topics · 14 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Should I Be Tested for Cancer? Maybe Not and Here's Why
H. Gilbert Welch · 2004
Argues that many cancer screening programmes detect slow-growing tumours that would never have caused harm, so screening trades a large population's…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Smoking and Carcinoma of the Lung: Preliminary Report
Richard Doll & A. Bradford Hill · 1950
Compares the smoking histories of lung-cancer patients with matched hospital controls, finds a dose-related excess, and in doing so establishes the…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Results of Operations for the Cure of Cancer of the Breast
William S. Halsted · 1894
Argues, from his own case series, that removing the breast, underlying muscle and axillary lymph nodes together is the only reliable cure for breast…
+8 more at this level
12 of 14 works
H. Gilbert Welch
Argues that many cancer screening programmes detect slow-growing tumours that would never have caused harm, so screening trades a large population's over-diagnosis and over-treatment against a small number of lives extended.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Traces cancer from its earliest recorded descriptions through the twentieth-century war on cancer, arguing that each era's treatment reflected the biological model of the disease then believed, mostly wrongly.
Richard Doll & A. Bradford Hill
Compares the smoking histories of lung-cancer patients with matched hospital controls, finds a dose-related excess, and in doing so establishes the case-control study as a way of identifying a cause.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jennifer S. Temel et al.
Reports a randomised trial showing that lung cancer patients assigned early palliative care alongside standard oncologic treatment lived longer and reported better quality of life than those receiving standard care alone.
Kat Arney (The Royal Institution)
Argues that cancer is evolution running inside the body, which is why it is intrinsic to multicellular life and why resistance to any single treatment is close to inevitable.
link checked 17 Sept 2026William S. Halsted
Argues, from his own case series, that removing the breast, underlying muscle and axillary lymph nodes together is the only reliable cure for breast cancer — the doctrine of radical mastectomy that dominated surgery for nearly a century until randomised trials showed less extensive surgery achieved equivalent survival.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Peyton Rous
Shows that a cell-free filtrate can transmit a solid tumour between chickens, establishing that a virus can cause cancer decades before the idea was accepted.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Sidney Farber et al.
Shows that a folic acid antagonist can drive childhood leukaemia into temporary remission, providing the first evidence that a systemic drug rather than surgery or radiation could treat cancer.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Carbone et al.
Sets out a staging system for Hodgkin's disease based on the number and location of involved nodal groups and whether disease has spread beyond the lymphatic system, becoming the Ann Arbor system used to stage lymphomas for decades.
Eric J. Hall
Works through how ionising radiation damages and kills cells, and why fractionating a dose across many small treatments rather than one large one better spares normal tissue while still controlling the tumour.
Douglas Hanahan & Robert A. Weinberg
Argues that the vast diversity of cancer genotypes reduces to a small set of shared capabilities — self-sufficient growth signalling, evasion of apoptosis, limitless replication among them — that any tumour must acquire to become malignant.
Brian J. Druker et al.
Reports that a drug designed to block the single fusion protein driving chronic myeloid leukaemia produced haematologic remission in nearly all patients, demonstrating that a cancer's specific molecular lesion could be targeted directly.