The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

sought to conquer. “ It seems a little unfair ,” one of his close friends from Chicago wrote (with vast understatement), “for someone who has done as much as you have to forward the work in this field to have to suffer personally.”
    In her voluminous collection of papers—in nearly eight hundred boxes filled with memoirs, letters, notes, and interviews—Mary Lasker left fewsigns of her response to this terrifying tragedy. Although obsessed with illness, she was peculiarly silent about its corporality, about the vulgarity of dying. There are occasional glimpses of interiority and grief: her visits to the Harkness Pavilion in New York to watch Albert deteriorate into a coma, or letters to various oncologists—including Farber—inquiring about yet another last-ditch drug. In the months before Albert’s death, these letters acquired a manic, insistent tone. He had seeded metastasis into the liver, and she searched discreetly, but insistently, for any possible therapy, however far-fetched, that might stay his illness. But for the vast part, there was silence—impenetrable, dense, and impossibly lonely. Mary Lasker chose to descend into melancholy alone.
    Albert Lasker died at eight o’clock on the morning of May 30, 1952. A small private funeral was held in the Lasker residence in New York. In his obituary, the
Times
noted, “He was more than a philanthropist, for he gave not only of his substance, but of his experience, ability and strength.”
    Mary Lasker gradually forged her way back to public life after her husband’s death. She returned to her routine of fund-raisers, balls, and benefits. Her social calendar filled up: dances for various medical foundations, a farewell party for Harry Truman, a fund-raiser for arthritis. She seemed self-composed, fiery, and energetic—blazing meteorically into the rarefied atmosphere of New York.
    But the person who charged her way back into New York’s society in 1953 was fundamentally different from the woman who had left it a year before. Something had broken and annealed within her. In the shadow of Albert’s death, Mary Lasker’s cancer campaign took on a more urgent and insistent tone. She no longer sought a strategy to
publicize
a crusade against cancer; she sought a strategy to
run
it. “We are at war with an insidious, relentless foe,” as her friend Senator Lister Hill would later put it—and a war of this magnitude demanded a relentless, total, unflinching commitment. Expediency must not merely inspire science; it must invade science. To fight cancer, the Laskerites wanted a radically restructured cancer agency, an NCI rebuilt from the ground up, stripped of its bureaucratic excesses, intensely funded, closely supervised—a goal-driven institute that would decisively move toward finding a cancer cure. The national effort against cancer, Mary Lasker believed, had become ad hoc, diffuse, and abstract. To rejuvenate it, it needed the disembodied legacy of Albert Lasker: a targeted, directed strategy borrowed from the world of business and advertising.
    Farber’s life also collided with cancer—a collision that he had perhaps presaged for a decade. In the late 1940s, he had developed a mysterious and chronic inflammatory disease of the intestines—likely ulcerative colitis, a debilitating precancerous illness that predisposes the colon and bile duct to cancer. In the mid-1950s (we do not know the precise date), Farber underwent surgery to remove his inflamed colon at Mount Auburn Hospital in Boston, likely choosing the small and private Cambridge hospital across the Charles River to keep his diagnosis and surgery hidden from his colleagues and friends on the Longwood campus. It is also likely that more than just “precancer” was discovered upon surgery—for in later years, Mary Lasker would refer to Farber as a “cancer survivor,” without ever divulging the nature of his cancer. Proud, guarded, and secretive—reluctant to conflate his battle against