In January 2011, Ron Lieber posted “Gordon Murray, Former Investment Banker, Dies at 60” on a blog for The New York Times. Gordon Murray, the investment banker whose conversion to passive investing was the subject of my Your Money column last Nov. 26, died on Saturday at his home in Burlingame, Calif. He was 60 years old and had suffered from glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. I first met Gordon when a close friend of his, a financial planner named Dan Goldie, got in touch with me to tell Mr. Murray’s story. Mr. Murray had spent decades at the highest levels of Wall Street, including Goldman Sachs, selling bonds. Many of his clients were managers of active mutual funds or other investors who seek to outperform various market indexes.
“It was six months ago that I was told I had six months to live. One of the good things about having one of these malignant glioblastomas is that you do get some time to get closure, to plan and to spend so much great time with your family and friends.”
“When I entered the business, illegal and unethical were the same. Now there’s a huge difference. Wall Street got much more skilled about crossing the line of illegality.”
In January 2011, Elizabeth MacBride wrote “Reflecting On A Talk With Gordon Murray, Investors’ Advocate and Publishing Phenom” for Forbes Magazine. Gordon Murray died on Saturday in his Burlingame home after a two-year battle with brain cancer. His passing came after years of advocacy of sensible investing, culminating in a book that has become a publishing phenomenon. The 60-year-old began writing, The Investment Answer in earnest this summer after he was given six months to live, in the wake of a scan that revealed his glioblastoma had advanced. He was prodded along with help from his friend and financial advisor, Dan Goldie, 47, who helped organize the project and write the book. See: Two DFA advisors win big book contract after ‘Dying banker’ article in NYTimes.
“You go through an initial period of sadness, but then you realize, ‘Okay, I can't do anything about it, so let's just make the most of what we have.’ I could have a great, quality six months, or I could take the risk with the chemo, the radiation, and all these other drugs they throw in you, but it might actually make things worse.”
In November 2010, NPR’s Fresh Air featured a story, “An Oncologist Writes a Biography of Cancer.” Oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee was treating one of his patients, a woman with advanced abdominal cancer who had relapsed multiple times, when she asked him what seemed like a simple question. "She said, 'I'm willing to go on, but before I go on, I need to know what it is I'm battling,' " Mukherjee tells NPR's Terry Gross. But, as Mukherjee explains, describing his patient's illness wasn't so simple. Defining cancer, he says, is something doctors and scientists have been struggling to do since the disease's first documented appearance thousands of years ago. Mukherjee's new book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, grew out of his desire to better understand the disease he treats, through examining the way cancer has been described and treated throughout history. He chronicles the ways therapies evolved, particularly in the 20th century, as more treatment options became available and scientists worked to understand the underlying genetic mutations that caused the disease.
“A breast cancer might turn out to have a close resemblance to a gastric cancer. And this kind of reorganization of cancer in terms of its internal genetic anatomy has really changed the way we treat and approach cancer in general.”
“What does it mean to be an oncologist? It means that you get to sit in at a moment of another person’s life that is so hyper-acute, and not just because they’re medically ill. It’s also a moment of hope and expectation and concern. It’s a moment when you get to erase everything that’s irrelevant and ask the most elemental questions — about survival, family, children, legacy.”
In November 2010, The Economist published “With hope, farewell fear: The long struggle to understand cancer.” It is said that when the good burghers of Amsterdam were first presented with a rhinoceros—armored, horned, three-toed, with a prehensile lip—spectators shook their heads in disbelief. Cancer provokes a similar bafflement. So protean are its forms and so varied its features that even specialist prognoses of aggressiveness, invasion and response to treatment have typically generated more exceptions than rules. Apparently, identical cancers in two patients may behave so unlike as to appear utterly different diseases. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “The Emperor of All Maladies” tells of the search for a “unifying theory” of cancer, the common attribute of all types of malignant cell growth that might reveal its cure. The arc of this rich and engrossing book matches Mr. Mukherjee’s personal evolution as an oncologist, beginning on the first day of his hospital residency. It seems that the diversity of this implacable, shape-shifting foe will defeat him. He is faced with dead-end discoveries, therapeutic disasters and revelations that lead only to more mysteries. But with the perceptiveness and patience of a true scientist he begins to weave these individual threads into a coherent and engrossing narrative.
“If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes. And the arrival of that moment really sent a chill down the spine of cancer biologists. Because here we were hoping that cancer would turn out to be some kind of exogenous event — a virus or something that could then be removed from our environment and our bodies and we could be rid of it — but as it turns out, cancer genes are sitting inside each and every one of our chromosomes, waiting to be corrupted or activated.”
Ads urge men of a certain age to get screened for prostate cancer. But is "test early, test often" the best approach? Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society and Mark Scholz, author of Invasion Of The Prostate Snatchers, discuss other approaches.
In "There Will Be Blood Pricks: Diabetes has forced me to become a self-tracker, and I can't stand it", Hanna Rosin at the Slate.com writes about the book:
I gravitate toward medical stories such as the one told by Mark Scholz in his recent book Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers. The screening test for prostate cancer, by quantifying a certain cancer indicator in the blood, has caused thousands of men—my father among them—to have operations they probably did not need. The test was effective at detecting cancer, but it could not distinguish between the lethal kind and the benign kind that grows slowly over time and never does any harm. The test, it turns out, was answering only half the question. In the face of a frightening disease, numbers can be very soothing. But they sometimes obscure what you really need to know. Something like this is also happening with diabetes.
And at that, there comes to mind a pairing. The other day, we blogged about "Wrong." The book and author's main thesis is that you can't trust in these studies and metrics blindly; you have to move forward with skepticism. And of course, there's The Emperor of All Maladies, which fashions itself as "biography" of cancer.
Elizabeth Edwards has died after a very public battle with cancer. We look at stories of cancer in America. Guests: Eleanor Clift, contributing editor to Newsweek and author of, "Two Weeks of Life: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Politics" ; Siddhartha Mukherjee, cancer physician and author of the new book, "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer."
Oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee was treating one of his patients, a woman with advanced abdominal cancer who had relapsed multiple times, when she asked him what seemed like a simple question. "She said, 'I'm willing to go on, but before I go on, I need to know what it is I'm battling,' " Mukherjee tells NPR's Terry Gross. But, as Mukherjee explains, describing his patient's illness wasn't so simple. Defining cancer, he says, is something doctors and scientists have been struggling to do since the disease's first documented appearance thousands of years ago
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 