The Transformed Cell

In 1968 surgeon Steven A. Rosenberg met a patient whose cancer had disappeared without explanation, and he wondered whether the body itself had mounted a massive immune response. Writing with John M. Barry, he describes the search that followed, testing whether immunotherapy, and later gene therapy, could work where surgery, radiation and chemotherapy had not. His base was the National Cancer Institute, where Rosenberg became chief of surgery at thirty-four and led a team of investigators. He recounts the heartbreaks, the first success in 1985, when a patient's X-ray showed tumor shrinkage, and the first experiments in history to insert foreign genes into humans. Eight pages of photographs accompany the text.

Peter Attia listed it in his article Why we're not wired to think scientifically.