★ Winner of the 2024 Russian Prosveshcheniye Prize in natural science!
★ Famous molecular biologist Maria Kondratova offers readers a scientific understanding of cancer’s essence and modern diagnostic and treatment methods, breaking public speculation and smashing rumours!
★ Although the theme is prominent, the book is not about disease and death, but about life—the complexity, fragility, and beauty of life.
★ For general readers who want to understand how healthy cells turn malignant and the scientific basis of modern anti-cancer therapies.

All basic features of life—the ability to grow and reproduce, to respond to environmental signals, and cellular structure (albeit in severely twisted, perverted form)—are found in cancer. Cell division is necessary for multicellular organisms, yet also becomes a cause of disease and death; the body’s wound-healing ability becomes a source of tumour growth; cooperation among human cells leads the immune system to fail against invasion. As physician and writer Siddhartha Mukherjee put it in The Emperor of All Maladies: “To confront cancer is to encounter a parallel species that is better adapted to survival than we are.” Few diseases or human conditions are surrounded by as much speculation and rumour as cancer, yet at the core of many guesses are echoes of real scientific theories, making truth and falsehood hard to distinguish. The author, molecular biologist Maria Kondratova of the Curie Institute, offers readers a scientific understanding of cancer’s essence and of modern diagnostic and treatment methods. Molecular oncology is an impressive example of how basic knowledge of genome structure and cellular regulatory systems is translated into drugs and diagnostics that save thousands of lives. Although the theme is prominent, the book is not about disease and death, but about life—its complexity, fragility, and beauty.
Maria Kondratova: PhD in Biological Sciences, writer, playwright. Graduated from Kharkov National University in biochemistry, began her scientific career at the Pushino Protein Institute, defended her PhD in structural biology in 2006, and since 2014 has worked at the Curie Institute in Paris—Europe’s largest cancer-research centre. Her current scientific interests are molecular oncology and immunology.