In 2021, checkpoint inhibitor and CAR-T immuno-oncology therapies were achieving remarkable outcomes for many cancer patients. As an ex-pharmaceutical industry chemist who had become a freelance science journalist, I’d spent years covering these advances. Then, in August, the news came: my partner, E, had cancer.
Just a month before I had an article published in the RSC’s Education in Chemistry explaining how new cancer treatments were helping people live longer. The key statistic had been that the proportion of patients surviving a decade after diagnosis had grown from one person in four 30 years ago to one in two today. But those statistics rang hollow when E tragically died in 2022.
Her journey, and mine before and since, have inspired me to set up an Instagram account called The Widowers Guide to the Science of Cancer (@cancerwidower). To help ensure E’s death isn’t wholly in vain, I share the basics of how cancer and treatments for it work, the gaps between expectation and reality, and advice based on my experience.
The decision hasn’t been easy, and not all my friends and family are happy about me sharing this so openly. But many people say it’s a great idea, and my experiences strongly suggest why.
A hard lesson
E’s death in 2022 inevitably left my life in turmoil. As I grieved and gradually rebuilt, writing was a reassuring constant.
Yet, when Chemistry World asked me to write about new cancer drugs, I felt that my previous stories had been too uncritical. Contrary to my expectations, none of the new immuno-oncology drugs were available to help E. In fact, most new cancer drugs target mutations that are not present in every patient and are usually only approved in certain types of cancer. And the flipside of the figures on cancer progress is that it is still massively widespread – it’s responsible for the death of someone in the UK every three minutes.
E was regularly screened – but the type of cancer she developed doesn’t have a standard screening test. I’ve angrily asked why. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s amazing biography of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, provided some of the answer: It’s very hard in many cases to get the balance between false positives and negatives right. That helps me realign my expectations – but the anger remains.
Redefining victory
All of which relates to the way many people discuss cancer research. Not least James Watson, who famously won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA. In 2009, he said: ‘Beating cancer now is a realistic ambition because, at long last, we largely know its true genetic and chemical characteristics.’
Watson was wrong on many things, and I think he’s wrong on this too. Cancer is too complex to overcome completely. Instead, I agree more with Mukherjee, who just two years later wrote about a more modest ambition. ‘We might as well focus more on prolonging life than eliminating death’, he says. ‘This war on cancer may best be “won” by redefining victory.’
I now try to include a more grounded perspective in my cancer coverage. Meanwhile, I’m trying to convey the idea of focussing on prolonging life rather than eliminating death with The Widowers Guide to the Science of Cancer – as it’s another message I have personal experience of.
Had it not been for great medics providing surgery, chemotherapy, palliative and hospice support, E might have died within six months of her diagnosis. But we got an extra year after that, a precious one full of joyful moments. And that showed me that even in its harshest moments, cancer can sharpen our appreciation of life’s beauty and brevity.
