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attractive baby, with blue eyes, long lashes, and a sunny disposition to match his golden hair. He looked like a cherub in a Renaissance fresco, pink and lively. Linda Gillick, who had taught first-graders for years, considered herself a good judge of children. This child, she decided, was perfect. She never changed her mind about that, despite all the horrors that followed. In his mother’s eyes, Michael would always be beautiful. 1
    In May, shortly after he turned three months old, Michael vomited after his morning feeding, which was out of character for him. Later that same day, when his father went to Michael’s crib to pick him up after his afternoon nap, the infant’s eyes were darting back and forth, as if he was staring at a swinging pendulum. By the time his terrified parents got him to the pediatrician’s office, Michael’s eyes had stoppedtheir bizarre movements, but the pediatrician recommended a visit to a neurologist, who gave Michael an electroencephalogram, a simple test of electrical activity in the brain. It came back normal, but Michael did not stop vomiting. The formerly placid infant also began to twist and turn in his sleep, as if he could not get comfortable. Five days after Michael’s symptoms started, his father was changing Michael’s diaper when he saw a lump beneath his son’s belly button. In a few more days, there were similar lumps on the small of his back and his right leg. Whatever they were, they were spreading with ferocious speed.
    Mystery and dread have always been the close consorts of cancer. The disease’s causes and progression have never been well understood, and its prognosis (at least until recently) has typically been dire. Cancer is older than humanity: In a Kenyan lakebed in 1932, anthropologist Louis Leakey found a fossilized lower jaw of a hominid ancestor, possibly
Homo erectus
or
Australopithecus
, that included a malignant bone tumor. A tumor has even been discovered in a dinosaur bone at least a hundred and fifty million years old. 2 The oldest surviving description of cancer is a papyrus from approximately 1700 B.C. but is probably a copy of a document at least a thousand years older. The fifteen-foot scroll, stolen from Thebes by tomb raiders in 1862 and sold to an American adventurer named Edwin Smith, includes a description of an attempt to treat tumors of the breast with a cauterizing “fire drill.” For “bulging tumors,” the scroll’s anonymous author notes, “there is no treatment.” 3
    The Greeks fared no better. While surgical removal of tumors was sometimes tried in ancient Egypt and India, Hippocrates preferred diets that were supposed to reduce “black bile” and restore the body’s “humoral balance.” But after watching his diets and more aggressive treatments fail, Hippocrates wrote in
Aphorisms
, “It is better to give no treatment to cases of hidden [internal] cancer; treatment causes speedy death, but to omit treatment is to prolong life.” 4 Hippocrates did make one lasting contribution by observing that bulbous tumors, especially when encircled by veins, looked like crabs. He used the Greek words
carcinos
and
carcinoma
, derived from the word
karkinos
,or crab, to describe the condition. Celsus, the venerated Roman physician whom Paracelsus boasted of surpassing, translated that to
cancer
, the Latin word for crab.
    The description fit, not only because of the shape of the solid tumors but also because of seemingly inexorable nature of cancer’s progression. “Cancer the Crab lies so still that you might think he was asleep if you did not see the ceaseless play and winnowing motion of the feathery branches round his mouth,” Rudyard Kipling wrote in an 1891 story, “The Children of the Zodiac.” “That movement never ceases. It is like the eating of a smothered fire into rotten timber in that it is noiseless and without haste.”
    The ancient healers were flummoxed by cancer for the same reasons that stymie present-day