Kim Gittleson

Dr. Siddhartha Mukerjee joined Leonard on today's show to talk about his comprehensive history of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. In the book, he makes reference to some of the seminal studies on cancer—from the discovery that drugs could help cure the disease (the birth of chemotherapy), to the way that genome sequencing has revolutionized the field. Amazingly enough, many of the studies that Dr. Mukerjee discusses are free online. Here, we've collected the three most important studies that are highlighted in the book. Just click on the link to take a step back in history—to a time when one drug used on one patient could fundamentally alter the face of cancer research forever.

• Temporary Remissiosn in Acute Leukemia in Children Produced by Folic Acid Antagonist, 4-Aminopteroyl-Glutamic Acid (Aminopterin) - This is Sidney Farber's seminal 1948 study detailing the first use of a chemical agent to treat cancer. Mukerjee writes of the study: "It's language was starched, formal, detached, and scientific. Yet, like all great medical papers, it was a page-turner. And like all good novels, it was timeless: to read it today is to be pitched behind the scenes into the tumultuous life of the Boston clinic, its patients hanging on for life as Farber and his assistants scrambled to find new drugs for a dreadful disease that kept flickering away and returning. It was a plot with a beginning, a middle, and, unfortunately, an end."
• Smoking and Carcinoma of the Lung: A Preliminary Report - When this report was published in the British Medical Journal in 1950 by Richard Doll and Bradford Hill, it was the first case-control study that proved the correlation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. A group of American researchers, Ernest Wynder and Everts Graham, simultaneously (and independently) published a similar study in the United States, Tobacco smoking as a possible etiologic factor in bronchiogenic carcinoma, that proved that the phenomenon was not just confined to one population.
• Effects of a Selective Inhibitor of the Abl Tyrosine Kinase on the Growth of Bcr-Abl Positive Cells - This paper, published by Brian Druker in 1996, was the first to demonstrate the effectiveness of drugs (in this case, Gleevac) that could target the "oncogene"—or the replication mechanism in a cancer cell. Mukerjee believes that specific gene therapies are part of the future of cancer medicine.

We asked, you wrote. There were 327 six-word phrases submitted in our Sum Up 2010 challenge. And while we're mostly interested in hearing your perspectives on the year, looked at in total, these phrases give us a good idea of what 2010 meant for many of us. To visually show you the wisdom of the crowd, we've created a word cloud—an image that shows the 75 most repeated words in your submitted phrases, with the size of the word proportional to how frequently it was used. Judging from the image below, it's hard to deny the influence that President Obama continued to exert in 2010—but the relative size of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party shows that this frequency might be due more to political fracturing than political unity. Lady GaGa, the BP oil spill, China, and, of course, the economy, were also well-represented by your phrases. Check out the image below and let us know what you think—does this seem like a good summary of 2010? What do you think was left out? And, of course—tell us your predictions for 2011!

Earlier this year the Museum of Modern Art acquired the "@" symbol as part of its permanent collection. MoMA design curator, Paola Antonelli, tells the story of how it came to be so ubiquitous. Produced by Kim Gittleson.

Cookbook author Meredith Deeds gets passionate about the kitchen tool that revolutionized baking and became a status symbol in the process. Produced by Kim Gittleson and Jillian Goodman.