Dr. Folkman's War: Angiogenesis and the Struggle to Defeat Cancer
Random House, 365 pp, $25.95, 2001 ISBN: 0375502440 | ISBN: 0-375-50244-0
The life and work of Judah Folkman make a fascinating story. There is an old saying to the effect that truth is like daylight shining behind a curtain which has many pinholes—how much you see doesn't depend on which hole you decide to look through, but on how close to the curtain you get your eye. Judah Folkman, in a research career spanning the last three decades, has clearly got very close to the curtain indeed. Extraordinarily, he arrived in cancer research after starting in a totally different area. The research that eventually moved towards angiogenesis actually began as a project investigating the damage sustained by erythrocytes as they circulated through a prototype heart-lung machine. This was perhaps a rather unpromising pinhole to start peering through, but this book meticulously chronicles and clearly explains every step from that project, to his current research which has far-reaching implications for the way cancers are treated. Folkman wanted to find out why natural blood vessels caused less damage than metal tubes, and to do that he needed a way of looking at blood vessels. That got him interested in what makes blood vessels grow and what stops them from growing, and by that time—from what we learn of his personality—his attention was fully engaged.
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