I just read this NYer article in its entirety. It's brilliant. As a CS-AI guy and biologist working in pharma (and on the margins of cancer), I found the arti

I just read this NYer article in its entirety. It's brilliant. As a CS-AI guy and biologist working in pharma (and on the margins of cancer), I found the article's thesis fascinating as a great look into the complexity of mining available bio data and as well as the limits inherent in mining only the signals that already exist. It's clear now that between the immune system and the body's gene activation networks that regulate each person's biological "soil", we need to 1) look well beyond the cancer itself to how each of us responds to the arrival of cancer cells as well as 2) how therapists can judge the actual risk from cancer, and 3) how we help the immune system to kick cancer's ass. After reading this piece, I finally bought both of Mukherjee's bestseller books. I already know a fair bit about both topics (cancer, genes), but it's now clear to me that the author's ability to focus my attention on the crux message while telling a great story makes the investment of my time in reading him easily worth the occasional revisit of material I already know.