Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us

Date/Time
Thursday
6 Feb 2014
4:00 pm - 6:00 pm




Location
470 Stephens Hall

Event Type
Colloquium

Lochlann Jain
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University

Professor Jain has written a book entitled Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us, which is in many ways, not about cancer.
This talk will visit the main themes and analytics of Malignant. Nearly half of all Americans will be diagnosed with an invasive cancer—an all-too ordinary aspect of daily life. Through a powerful combination of cultural analysis and memoir, this stunningly original book explores why cancer remains so confounding, despite the billions of dollars spent in the search for a cure. Amidst furious debates over its causes and treatments, scientists generate reams of data—information that ultimately obscures as much as it clarifies. Award-winning anthropologist S. Lochlann Jain deftly unscrambles the high stakes of the resulting confusion. Expertly reading across a range of material that includes history, oncology, law, economics, and literature, Jain explains how a national culture that simultaneously aims to deny, profit from, and cure cancer entraps us in a state of paradox—one that makes the world of cancer virtually impossible to navigate for doctors, patients, caretakers, and policy makers alike. This chronicle, burning with urgency and substance leavened with brio and wit, offers a lucid guide to understanding and navigating the quicksand of uncertainty at the heart of cancer. Malignant vitally shifts the terms of an epic battle we have been losing for decades: the war on cancer.
This event is sponsored by CSTMS.
Additional sponsorship comes from:  Office for the History of Science and Technology