The 6-hour Ken Burns and Barak Goodman television documentary “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies,” television documentary “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies,” shown on PBS, is an extraordinary event and demonstrates what television can deliver at its best. Based on the best-selling 2010 book by Siddhartha Mukherjee The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, it combines a sweeping survey of the evolving understanding of cancer and its treatment over the past seventy years with stories of real people whose lives are upended by a cancer diagnosis.

Cancer has been around as long as the human race. In fact, cancer predates the emergence of Homo sapiens and has even been detected in dinosaur bones. However, it is only in the past few decades that science has begun to understand the process whereby a normal cell becomes malignant and embarks on a deadly course of uncontrolled growth.

In addition to recounting advances in treatment, the film tells the parallel story of the evolution of ideas about what causes cancer, and here too, it delivers an enlightening, if humbling, lesson. The finding of cancer genes derived from viruses in human cancers led to the idea that viruses would turn out to cause many cancers. But, aside from cervical cancer and liver cancer, these hopes have not been borne out.

Read full, original article: Ken Burns’ Magisterian “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies