A review by cobyrowley
The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last by Azra Raza

challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective tense fast-paced

4.5

Dr. Raza explores many patients' stories, including the perspective of family members. This storytelling and addition of multiple points of view from close friends and family make each person's story tragic and heartbreaking in their own right. The heartbreak and grief of these patients and their respective families underscores the importance of the much-needed paradigm shift she has been endorsing for decades: the study of cancer-specific screenings to detect and possibly locate aggressive cancers in their infancy. She speaks out against in vivo and in vitro studies that pursue cancer medications and explains the passenger mutations of clonal cells to the reader at a simple level; at the same time, Raza's literacy and descriptiveness challenged me to attempt to understand these concepts intricately yet at a surface level. This is a great book and a blaring wake-up call to the current state of cancer medicine research.