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My very good friend Andrea Martin lived through three bouts of breast cancer. She used to say,
The only way I will know I have really survived breast cancer is when I die of something else.
She did: when she was fifty-six, a new and unrelated malignancy of the brain turned her into a breast cancer survivor.Three years before a tangled web of glioblastoma multiforme invadedher brain, Andrea wasin excellent health. As part of a pilot researchstudy, she was tested for chemical contaminants.1 She hadnever worked in a factory. She had no chemically intensive hobbies likeboatbuilding or oil painting. Yet it turned out that Andrea was a walkingtoxic waste site. Her body contained nearly one hundred differentchemical residues, half of which caused cancer when tested in experimentalanimals.Many of these toxins didnt exist when she was bornin the middle of the past century. Had they played any role in causingeither her breast or brain tumors? Did her frequent use of thoseclunky first-generation cell phones have anything to do with it? It issad that we dont know. It is appalling that we cant find out.In 1973, out of every 100,000 men aged fifty-five to fifty-nine, onlyfive developedmultiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow. By1983 that number had doubled and included my dad, a healthy middle agedman who never smoked or drank much. He was one of about seven

thousand people with the disease that year. I have to say about becausethere is still no national system for counting cases of cancer. Only inthose parts of the country with statewide or regional registries can wesaywith any accuracy how many cases are occurring. These registriesform the backbone of any effort to understand the causes of the disease.They allow us to ask whether rates vary in different locales or for peopleof different backgrounds and experiences. For more than half a century,countries like Denmark and Sweden have maintained nationwide cancerregistries that record every single case of thedisease, but the UnitedStates has not. We still dont have a system that covers the entire country.What we dont measure, we cant count.We cant be sure why my dads bone marrow stopped working. He lived through some remarkable encounters with agents that affect thebones ability to produce blood. Men who work with metal fumes asmachinists or welders, or with cutting oils and solvents in steel mills,or whohave had regular radiation exposures as part of frequent diagnosticchecks in the military my dad did all of these things suffermultiple myeloma cancer at higher rates than the rest of us. That healso survived a massive explosion of benzene from the family drycleaning shop underneath his home when he was a toddler surelyadded to the lifelong burden on his ability to make healthy blood.Maybe thataccident in 1924 contributed to his death many decadeslater. We cant say. Look around and it seems that cancer has become the price of modernlife. In America and England, one out of every two men and oneout of every three women will develop cancer in their lifetime. InAmerica alone, there are currently more than 10 million cancer survivors.Cancer is the leading killer of middle-aged persons, and,afteraccidents, is the second-leading killer of children.How did this happen? How did a disease that was once so atypicalbecome so ordinary? Are we simply talking more about an illness thathas always been around? Some twenty-five hundred years ago, theGreek physician Hippocrates depicted a tumor as a muddled irritablecavity with spindly legs flaring out of control in all directions. Fascinatedwithits evil animal-like appearance, he termed cancer karkinoma,the Greek word for crab. Like Hippocrates, we are drawn toobjects of menacing beauty.
Now we have tools like electron micrographs that allow us to findthings much smaller than the tiniest crab things we could not haveseen or imagined even a decade ago. Couldnt cancer have been therefor eons, disguised as ordinary life? Some of the growth...