The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

Spoiler Alert: Fung's "big idea" is the application of Darwinian evolution - survival of the fittest - to cellular mutations. That's the "code". I read the book cover-to-cover so you don't have to. For those who haven't completed an MIT biology course like I have, here are the basics. All cancer comes from mutations of your DNA. Many mutations are harmless. Others are corrected by our bodies' cellular machinery. Still others are detected and the cell either kills itself (apoptosis) or is killed by our immune system. A very few mutations - and it takes a handful of very specific ones out of billions of "letters" of instructions that make up our DNA - turn a normal cell into a cancerous one. The main difference is that these cells grow and divide more than they are supposed to; the mechanisms that tell a cell "don't divide" are broken. Fung states - calling it the "Somatic Mutation Theory" - that for decades, scientists considered mutations to be entirely random, as opposed to the very obvious idea that the mutations are subjected to the same evolutionary pressure as every other level of life. That is to say, mutations that help cancer cells survive better are passed on as the cells divide. There are implications to this, and he examines them in some detail, but there simply is no "Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery". There's a guy making money off of a scary disease by selling books, and that's all.