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[Part Two of “Genetic Gamble: New Approaches to Fighting Cancer.”] Genetic sequencing has led to promising new treatments for cancer, but we still have a ways to go: “Scientists had compared the entire genetic sequences of the tumor cells invading her body with those in her healthy cells, searching for mutated tumor genes that could […]

[Part Three of “Genetic Gamble: New Approaches to Fighting Cancer.”] A genetic test for people with eye melanomas reveals whether patients are likely to live or die with “uncanny precision”: “The test identifies one of two gene patterns in eye melanomas. Almost everyone in Class 1 — roughly half of patients — is cured when […]

A couple learns about a cancer diagnosis: “I watch your hand starting to shake as you write down information that will sit on a small square of paper for months, impossible to get rid of. I stand two feet away and watch your lips. I hear you say, Is that all you can tell me…. […]

Tracing a years-long Internet hoax back to its creator, a 22-year-old woman in Ohio: “On the evening of May 13, Mother’s Day, a Canadian woman named Dana Dirr was hit head-on while driving to the Saskatchewan hospital where she worked as a trauma surgeon. She was 35 weeks pregnant, but determined to work until the […]

A group of Marines discover they have breast cancer—a diagnosis that is rare in men, and even more startling given they all had previously lived in the same area, Camp Lejeune in North Carolina: “It all started with Mike Partain, a.k.a. Number One. A barrel-chested father of four with a goatee and a predilection for […]

William Stuntz, a conservative law professor at Harvard, was suffering from colon cancer and spent the last three years of his life working on a book that aimed to rethink how our justice system has failed: “Stuntz submitted his completed manuscript to his editor at Harvard University Press in January 2011, about three months before […]

One fine June day, the author is launching his best-selling memoir, Hitch-22. The next, he’s throwing up backstage at The Daily Show, in a brief bout of denial, before entering the unfamiliar country—with its egalitarian spirit, martial metaphors, and hard bargains of people who have cancer.

We have all indulged this curiosity, haven’t we? What would I do if I suddenly found I had a short time to live … What would it be like to sit in a doctor’s office and hear a death sentence? I had entertained those fantasies just like the next person. So when it actually happened, […]

[Fiction] “It just doesn’t make sense,” she said. “I mean, my sisters get pregnant looking at a cologne ad. They get pregnant in pollen season.” For six months they had been trying to conceive, and still her period was as regular as the tide. She decided to see a doctor. He told her it would […]

Soon after he arrived in the United States—by which time his former psychoanalytic colleagues were questioning his sanity—Wilhelm Reich invented the Orgone Energy Accumulator, a wooden cupboard about the size of a telephone booth, lined with metal and insulated with steel wool. It was a box in which, it might be said, his ideas about […]