Results by Title
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Adaptive Oncogenesis: A New Understanding of How Cancer Evolves inside Us
James DeGregori
Harvard University Press, 2018
Library of Congress RC268.5.D437 2018 | Dewey Decimal 616.891425
Popular understanding holds that genetic changes create cancer. James DeGregori uses evolutionary principles to propose a new way of thinking about cancer’s occurrence. Cancer is as much a disease of evolution as it is of mutation, one in which mutated cells outcompete healthy cells in the ecosystem of the body’s tissues. His theory ties cancer’s progression, or lack thereof, to evolved strategies to maximize reproductive success.
Through natural selection, humans evolved genetic programs to maintain bodily health for as long as necessary to increase the odds of passing on our genes—but not much longer. These mechanisms engender a tissue environment that favors normal stem cells over precancerous ones. Healthy tissues thwart cancer cells’ ability to outcompete their precancerous rivals. But as our tissues age or accumulate damage from exposures such as smoking, normal stem cells find themselves less optimized to their ecosystem. Cancer-causing mutations can now help cells adapt to these altered tissue environments, and thus outcompete normal cells. Just as changes in a species’ habitat favor the evolution of new species, changes in tissue environments favor the growth of cancerous cells.
DeGregori’s perspective goes far in explaining who gets cancer, when it appears, and why. While we cannot avoid mutations, it may be possible to sustain our tissues’ natural and effective system of defense, even in the face of aging or harmful exposures. For those interested in learning how cancers arise within the human body, the insights in Adaptive Oncogenesis offer a compelling perspective.
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Africanizing Oncology: Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda
Marissa Mika
Ohio University Press, 2021
Library of Congress RC279.U33 | Dewey Decimal 616.9940096761
An innovative contemporary history that blends insights from a variety of disciplines to highlight how a storied African cancer institute has shaped lives and identities in postcolonial Uganda.
Over the past decade, an increasingly visible crisis of cancer in Uganda has made local and international headlines. Based on transcontinental research and public engagement with the Uganda Cancer Institute that began in 2010, Africanizing Oncology frames the cancer hospital as a microcosm of the Ugandan state, as a space where one can trace the lived experiences of Ugandans in the twentieth century. Ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, patient records, oral histories, private papers from US oncologists, American National Cancer Institute records, British colonial office reports, and even the architecture of the institute itself show how Ugandans understood and continue to shape ideas about national identity, political violence, epidemics, and economic life.
Africanizing Oncology describes the political, social, technological, and biomedical dimensions of how Ugandans created, sustained, and transformed this institute over the past half century. With insights from science and technology studies and contemporary African history, Marissa Mika’s work joins a new wave of contemporary histories of the political, technological, moral, and intellectual aspirations and actions of Africans after independence. It contributes to a growing body of work on chronic disease and situates the contemporary urgency of the mounting cancer crisis on the continent in a longer history of global cancer research and care. With its creative integration of African studies, science and technology studies, and medical anthropology, Africanizing Oncology speaks to multiple scholarly communities.
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Bodies Unbound: Gender-Specific Cancer and Biolegitimacy
Piper Sledge
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Library of Congress RC280.B8 | Dewey Decimal 616.99449
Bodies Unbound is a story about the relationship between bodies and gender. Drawing on the experiences of individuals whose bodies and gender identities don’t match medical and social expectations, Piper Sledge explores how ideologies of gendered bodies shape medical care when medical professionals use their position of authority to dictate which combinations of bodies and genders are legitimate or not.
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A Cancer Companion: An Oncologist's Advice on Diagnosis, Treatment, and Recovery
Ranjana Srivastava
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Library of Congress RC263.S67 2015 | Dewey Decimal 616.994
Cancer. It’s the diagnosis no one wants to hear. Unfortunately though, these days most of us have known or will know someone who receives it. But what’s next? With the diagnosis comes not only fear and uncertainty, but numerous questions, and a lot of unsolicited advice. With A Cancer Companion, esteemed oncologist Ranjana Srivastava is here to help, bringing both experience and honesty to guide cancer patients and their families through this labyrinth of questions and treatments.
With candor and compassion, Srivastava provides an approachable and authoritative reference. She begins with the big questions, like what cancer actually is, and she moves on to offer very practical advice on how to find an oncologist, what to expect during and after treatments, and how to manage pain, diet, and exercise. She discusses in detail the different therapies for cancers and why some cancers are inoperable, and she skillfully addresses the emotional toll of the disease. She speaks clearly and directly to cancer patients, caretakers, and their loved ones, offering straightforward information and insight, something that many oncologists can’t always convey in the office.
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Cancer Entangled: Anticipation, Acceleration, and the Danish State
Rikke Sand Andersen
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Cancer Entangled explores the shifts that took place in Denmark around the millennium, when health promoters set out to minimize delays in cancer diagnoses in hope of improving cancer survival. The authors suggest a temporal reframing of cancer control that emphasizes the importance of focusing on how people – potential patients as well as health care professionals – experience and anticipate cancer before a diagnosis or a prediction has been made. This argument compellingly challenges and augments anthropological work on cancer control that has privileged attention to the productive role of science and technology and to life with cancer or cancer risk. By offering rich ethnographic insights into the introduction of the first cancer vaccine, cancer signs and symptoms, public discourses on delays, social class and care seeking, cancer suspicion in the clinic, as well as the work on fast-track referral – the book convincingly situates cancer control in an ethical registrar involving attention to acceleration and time, showing how cancer waiting times become an index of the "state of the nation".
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Cancer on Trial: Oncology as a New Style of Practice
Peter Keating and Alberto Cambrosio
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Library of Congress RC254.5.K43 2012 | Dewey Decimal 616.9940072
Until the early 1960s, cancer treatment consisted primarily of surgery and radiation therapy. Most practitioners then viewed the treatment of terminally ill cancer patients with heroic courses of chemotherapy as highly questionable. The randomized clinical trials that today sustain modern oncology were relatively rare and prompted stiff opposition from physicians, who were loath to assign patients randomly to competing treatments. Yet today these trials form the basis of medical oncology. How did such a spectacular change occur? How did medical oncology pivot from a nonentity and, in some regards, a reviled practice to the central position it now occupies in modern medicine?
In Cancer on Trial Peter Keating and Alberto Cambrosio explore how practitioners established a new style of practice, at the center of which lies the cancer clinical trial. Far from mere testing devices, these trials have become full-fledged experiments that have redefined the practices of clinicians, statisticians, and biologists. Keating and Cambrosio investigate these trials and how they have changed since the 1960s, all the while demonstrating their significant impact on the progression of oncology. A novel look at the institution of clinical cancer research and therapy, this book will be warmly welcomed by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of science and medicine, as well as clinicians and researchers in the cancer field.
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Cancer Screening in the Developing World: Case Studies and Strategies from the Field
Edited by Madelon L. Finkel
Dartmouth College Press, 2018
Library of Congress RA645.C3C36473 2018 | Dewey Decimal 362.196994009172
Worldwide, cancer is responsible for one in eight deaths—more than AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined. This global burden starkly illustrates the inequality between the developed and the developing world. While the majority of people living in developed countries receive timely treatment, those living in developing countries are not as fortunate and their survival rates are much lower—not only due to delays in diagnosis, but also to a lack of personnel, a paucity of treatment facilities, and the unavailability of many medications. Routine screening—a mainstay in the developed world—could greatly increase the likelihood of identifying individuals with early stage cancers and thus reduce the number of people who present with advanced disease. This book represents a critical addition to the literature of global health studies. Focusing on cervical, breast, and oral cancers, these case studies highlight innovative strategies in cancer screening in a diverse array of developing countries. The authors discuss common issues and share how obstacles—medical, economic, legal, social, and psychological—were addressed or overcome in specific settings. Each chapter offers an empirical discussion of the nature and scope of a screening program, the methodology used, and its findings, along with a candid discussion of challenges and limitations and suggestions for future efforts.
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Cancer Stem Cells: Philosophy and Therapies
Lucie Laplane
Harvard University Press, 2016
Library of Congress RC269.7.L37 2016 | Dewey Decimal 616.99407
An innovative theory proposes a new therapeutic strategy to break the stalemate in the war on cancer. It is called cancer stem cell (CSC) theory, and Lucie Laplane offers a comprehensive analysis, based on an original interdisciplinary approach that combines biology, biomedical history, and philosophy.
Rather than treat cancer by aggressively trying to eliminate all cancerous cells—with harmful side effects for patients—CSC theory suggests the possibility of targeting the CSCs, a small fraction of cells that lie at the root of cancers. CSCs are cancer cells that also have the defining properties of stem cells—the abilities to self-renew and to differentiate. According to this theory, only CSCs and no other cancer cells can induce tumor formation.
To date, researchers have not agreed on the defining feature of CSCs—their stemness. Drawing from a philosophical perspective, Laplane shows that there are four possible ways to understand this property: stemness can be categorical (an intrinsic property of stem cells), dispositional (an intrinsic property whose expression depends on external stimuli), relational (an extrinsic property determined by a cell’s relationship with the microenvironment), or systemic (an extrinsic property controlled at the system level). Our ability to cure cancers may well depend upon determining how these definitions apply to different types of cancers.
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The Cancer Within: Reproduction, Cultural Transformation, and Health Care in Romania
Cristina A. Pop
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Library of Congress RC280.U8 | Dewey Decimal 616.99466009498
The Cancer Within examines cervical cancer in Romania as a point of entry into an anthropological reflection on contemporary health care. Cervical cancer prevention reveals the inner workings of emerging post-communist medicine, which aligns the state and the market, public and private health care providers, policy makers, and ordinary women. Fashioned by patriarchal relations, lived religion, and the historical trauma of pronatalism, Romanian women’s responses to reproductive medicine and cervical cancer prevention are complicated by neoliberal reforms to medical care. Cervical cancer prevention – and especially the HPV vaccination – provided Romanians a legitimate instance to express their conflicting views of post-communist medicine. What sets Romania apart is that pronatalism, patriarchy, lived religion, medical reforms, and moral contestation of preventive medicine bring into line systemic contingencies that expose the historical, social, and cultural trajectories of cervical cancer.
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Clinical Trials in Ovarian Cancer
Walsh, Christine S
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Library of Congress RC280.O8W35 2017 | Dewey Decimal 616.99465
When a patient is diagnosed with a gynecological malignancy, she and her doctors must make urgent, high-risk decisions about her course of treatment. In selecting an appropriate plan of care, physicians must weigh the patient’s individual needs, the tumor’s specific characteristics, and the treatment’s potential side effects. Because there is no one-size-fits-all treatment solution, a plethora of clinical trials have been performed on ovarian cancer patients, but clinicians may struggle to keep up with this ever-growing body of research.
Collecting and synthesizing research findings from a wide array of medical journal articles and book chapters, Clinical Trials in Ovarian Cancer provides physicians with an invaluable resource. Gynecologic oncologist Christine S. Walsh systematically outlines each of the seminal Phase III trials that have shaped the treatment of ovarian cancers, detailing the rationale for the trial, the patient population studied, treatment delivery methods, efficacy, toxicity, and trial conclusions. She provides a clear overview of established treatments, as well as still-controversial experimental approaches.
The first book to organize this cutting-edge research into an easy-to-use reference, Clinical Trials in Ovarian Cancer should help medical personnel at all levels provide their patients with the highest standard of care.
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A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine
Robin Wolfe Scheffler
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Library of Congress QR372.O6S34 2019 | Dewey Decimal 616.994019
Is cancer a contagious disease? In the late nineteenth century this idea, and attending efforts to identify a cancer “germ,” inspired fear and ignited controversy. Yet speculation that cancer might be contagious also contained a kernel of hope that the strategies used against infectious diseases, especially vaccination, might be able to subdue this dread disease. Today, nearly one in six cancers are thought to have an infectious cause, but the path to that understanding was twisting and turbulent.
A Contagious Cause is the first book to trace the century-long hunt for a human cancer virus in America, an effort whose scale exceeded that of the Human Genome Project. The government’s campaign merged the worlds of molecular biology, public health, and military planning in the name of translating laboratory discoveries into useful medical therapies. However, its expansion into biomedical research sparked fierce conflict. Many biologists dismissed the suggestion that research should be planned and the idea of curing cancer by a vaccine or any other means as unrealistic, if not dangerous. Although the American hunt was ultimately fruitless, this effort nonetheless profoundly shaped our understanding of life at its most fundamental levels. A Contagious Cause links laboratory and legislature as has rarely been done before, creating a new chapter in the histories of science and American politics.
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Courage...Chronicled in the Sand: Sand Tray Therapy Reflections from Teenagers and Young Adults Facing Cancer and Blood Disorders
Jennifer Gretzema
Michigan Publishing Services, 2017
It is often difficult for young people facing an illness to verbalize their personal thoughts and feelings. In the Child and Family Life department, at The University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, sand tray therapy is used to help this vulnerable population communicate with their healthcare team, families, and loved ones. Sand tray therapy is a window into the thoughts, feelings, and coping styles of youth struggling with life-altering illnesses and hospitalizations. It helps them process their past and present medical experiences, set goals, and teach others about their needs.
The sand trays and stories in this book were created by patients and families living with Cancer and Blood Disorders. Their expressions, created in the sand and conveyed through the written word, provide insight into their world. Sand tray therapy provides a sacred space to process experiences using symbols instead of language.
This collection of photos and personal stories was compiled so that other patients, their families, and their friends can share the authors’ journeys.
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The Cure: A Story of Cancer and Politics from the Annals of the Cold War
Nikolai Krementsov
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Library of Congress RC271.I45K74 2002 | Dewey Decimal 616.99406072047
Did America try to steal Soviet "cancer secrets"? And how could a cancer cure turn into a "biological atomic bomb"? Nikolai Krementsov's compelling tale of cancer and politics is the story of a husband-and-wife team who developed a promising anticancer treatment in Stalin's Russia, only to see their discovery entangled in Cold War rivalries, ideological conflict, and scientific turf wars.
In 1946, Nina Kliueva and Grigorii Roskin announced the discovery of a preparation able to "dissolve" tumors in mice. Preliminary clinical trials suggested that KR, named after its developers, might work in humans as well. Media hype surrounding KR prompted the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union to seek U.S.-Soviet cooperation in perfecting the possible cure. But the escalating Cold War gave this American interest a double edge. Though it helped Kliueva and Roskin solicit impressive research support from the Soviet leadership, including Stalin, it also thrust the couple into the center of an ideological confrontation between the superpowers. Accused of divulging "state secrets" to America, the couple were put on a show trial, and their "antipatriotic sins" were condemned in Soviet stage and film productions.
Parlaying their notoriety into increased funding, Kliueva and Roskin continued their research, but envious colleagues discredited their work and took over their institute. For years, work on KR languished and ceased entirely with the deaths of Kliueva and Roskin. But recently, the Russian press reported that work on KR has begun again, reopening this illuminating story of the intersection among Cold War politics, personal ideals, and biomedical research.
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Discovering Retroviruses: Beacons in the Biosphere
Anna Marie Skalka
Harvard University Press, 2018
Library of Congress QR414.5S53 2018 | Dewey Decimal 579.2569
Approximately eight percent of our DNA contains retroviral sequences that are millions of years old. Through engaging stories of scientific discovery, Anna Marie Skalka explains our evolving knowledge of these ancient denizens of the biosphere and how this understanding has significantly advanced research in genetic engineering, gene delivery systems, and precision medicine.
Discovering Retroviruses begins with the pioneer scientists who first encountered these RNA-containing viruses and solved the mystery of their reproduction. Like other viruses, retroviruses invade the cells of a host organism to reproduce. What makes them “retro” is a unique process of genetic information transfer. Instead of transcribing DNA into RNA as all living cells do, they transcribe their RNA into DNA. This viral DNA is then spliced into the host’s genome, where the cell’s synthetic machinery is co-opted to make new virus particles. The 100,000 pieces of retroviral DNA in the human genome are remnants from multiple invasions of our ancestors’ “germline” cells—the cells that allow a host organism to reproduce. Most of these bits of retroviral DNA are degenerated fossils, but some have been exploited during evolution, with profound effects on our physiology.
Some present-day circulating retroviruses cause cancers in humans and other animals. Others, like HIV, cause severe immunodeficiencies. But retroviruses also hold clues to innovative approaches that can prevent and treat these diseases. In laboratories around the world, retroviruses continue to shed light on future possibilities that are anything but “retro.”
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Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic
Julie Livingston
Duke University Press, 2012
Library of Congress RC279.B55L58 2012 | Dewey Decimal 362.196994009688
In Improvising Medicine, Julie Livingston tells the story of Botswana's only dedicated cancer ward, located in its capital city of Gaborone. This affecting ethnography follows patients, their relatives, and ward staff as a cancer epidemic emerged in Botswana. The epidemic is part of an ongoing surge in cancers across the global south; the stories of Botswana's oncology ward dramatize the human stakes and intellectual and institutional challenges of an epidemic that will shape the future of global health. They convey the contingencies of high-tech medicine in a hospital where vital machines are often broken, drugs go in and out of stock, and bed-space is always at a premium. They also reveal cancer as something that happens between people. Serious illness, care, pain, disfigurement, and even death emerge as deeply social experiences. Livingston describes the cancer ward in terms of the bureaucracy, vulnerability, power, biomedical science, mortality, and hope that shape contemporary experience in southern Africa. Her ethnography is a profound reflection on the social orchestration of hope and futility in an African hospital, the politics and economics of healthcare in Africa, and palliation and disfigurement across the global south.
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Precision Medicine Oncology: A Primer
Lorna Rodriguez-Rodriguez
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Library of Congress RC263 | Dewey Decimal 616.994
Precision medicine is rapidly becoming the standard-of-care for the treatment of cancer patients. This is made possible, in part, by the ready availability and reasonable costs of comprehensive DNA and RNA sequencing assays. However, precision medicine is complex and incorporates entirely new types of data and treatment paradigms that are outside of the training of most oncologists in practice today.
Precision Medicine Oncology: A Primer is a concise review of the fundamental principles and applications of precision medicine, intended for clinicians, particularly those working in oncology. It provides an accessible introduction to the technological advances in DNA and RNA sequencing, gives a detailed overview of approaches to the interpretation of molecular test results and their point-of-care implementation for individual patients, and describes innovative clinical trial designs in oncology as well as characteristics of the computational infrastructures through which massive quantities of data are collected, stored, and used in precision medicine oncology.
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Precision Radiation Oncology
Haffty, Bruce G
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Library of Congress RC271.R3P725 2018
Precision medicine is a rapidly-evolving field in the management of cancer. The use of novel molecular or genetic signatures in local-regional management is still in its infancy. Precision Radiation Oncology demystifies this state-of-the-art research and technology.
By describing current existing clinical and pathologic features, and focusing on the ability to improve outcomes in cancer using radiation therapy, this book discusses incorporating novel genomic- or biology-based biomarkers in the treatment of patients moving radiation oncology into precision/personalized medicine. Precision Radiation Oncology provides readers with an overview of the new developments of precision medicine in radiation oncology, further advancing the integration of new research findings into individualized radiation therapy and its clinical applications.
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Prostate Cancer: Making Survival Decisions
Sylvan Meyer and Seymour C. Nash, M.D., F.A.C.S.
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Library of Congress RC280.P7M49 1994 | Dewey Decimal 616.99463
Written by a surviving prostate cancer patient and his urologist, Prostate Cancer: Making Survival Decisions provides not just a physician's overview of the disease, but the compassion, understanding, and frankness of a man who's lived through the experience. From the first symptoms to early diagnosis to life after treatment, journalist Sylvan Meyer details every facet of the disease from the patient's point of view. Along with a clear, complete guide to the latest treatments, techniques, and findings, Meyer outlines the tough decisions the patient will face; describes what it's like to go through all the tests, the treatment, and the recovery; and provides an understanding of how the patient himself can affect the outcome.
Thoroughly researched and imbued with great sensitivity, Prostate Cancer: Making Survival Decisions is the most informative and illuminating book about prostate cancer available. Not just an indispensable tool for those who have been diagnosed or are at risk, this is an important guide for anyone who seeks a better understanding of this enigmatic disease and the controversies surrounding it.
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Variables Related to Human Breast Cancer
V. Elving Anderson
University of Minnesota Press, 1958
Variables Related to Human Breast Cancer was first published in 1958.The question of what role, if any, heredity plays in the etiology of human cancer is of obvious importance in the continuing search for an answer to the riddle of cancer. This book describes a study which was conducted at the Dight Institute for Human Genetics of the University of Minnesota, seeking evidence on two aspects of the heredity question. The objectives were, first, to determine whether there is an increased frequency of cancer among relatives of breast cancer patients (over what would be expected by coincidence) and second, to find out whether any family tendency to cancer is general or site-specific.The families of 621 breast cancer patients treated at the Tumor Clinic of the University of Minnesota Hospitals were investigated, with special attention to the choice of original patients and to the completeness of information. For comparison the authors studied the families of husbands of the patients and also analyzed statistics on cancer cases and deaths in the general population.The methods used in the project are described in detail, the data are presented, and the results interpreted. The findings are of value not only in their scientific application but also for use in counseling relatives of breast cancer patients, since these relatives often have greater fear of developing cancer than the facts warrant.
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