What Science Knows About Cancer

By: David Sadava, The Great Courses

Narrated by: David Sadava

The landscape of cancer treatment and prevention is a vastly different place than it was even a decade ago. Thanks to a relatively new focus on molecular medicine, researchers are gaining a deeper understanding of the mechanisms involved in the disease, poising them on the brink of huge breakthroughs.

What Science Knows About Cancer reports from the front lines of the war on cancer with a clear and scientifically precise - yet thoroughly accessible - guide to how the disease develops, thrives, and can potentially be conquered. An abundance of edifying charts and slides provide a rich visual reference for the information presented, while in-depth accounts of patient histories, clinical trials, and epidemiologic studies enrich your experience and aid comprehension. Taught by David Sadava, a laboratory researcher at the City of Hope Medical Center and an award-winning professor of biology at The Claremont Colleges, this fascinating 24-lecture course leaves no stone unturned in explaining the amazing ways cancer works to subvert the body, and how new therapies can reverse these insidious processes. Cancer isn't necessarily something any of us likes to think about, but knowledge truly is power.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2013 The Great Courses (P)2013 The Teaching Company, LLC

Excellent

This course is excellent all the way around. I recommend it to Just about anyone.

I learned how little I knew - Recommend!

A well organized review of science based principles of cancer development and steps to take to mitigate. I learned a great deal. Cleared up numerous misconceptions.

Good information

But, presented in an odd way. Worth the listen though. It’s not a textbook for beginners though.

Good overall but need PDF

It was hard to follow without the diagrams he was talking about. I enjoyed it however because I still learned.

Great Course!

One of the better great courses. The lecturer was clear but did not talk down to listeners. He was clearly extremely interested in the subject and wanted listeners to understand it well.

Good info clearly meant for video consumption

This is a good course with worthwhile content. It covers a wide range of topics from epidemiology to cell biology to causes to various types of treatments to prevention and more.

Compared to many other Great Courses I've listened to, the professor makes a lot of references to graphics and charts on the screen in the video format of the course. In most cases he verbally describes them and their key takeaways. The audiobook description even touts these visuals, but ironically, as with most Great Courses on Audible, the accompanying PDF is almost entirely text. The PDF doesn't even mention let alone show an example of something like a Kaplan-Meier Survival Curve that the professor refers to frequently. I'm a Great Courses regular and was able to tolerate this, but I'm sure this would frustrate or confuse a lot of listeners.

Amazing!

Great insights into current state of cancer research, treatment and diagnosis. A rich understanding of cancer necessarily needs some understanding of the underlying genetics, molecular make up and progression of the disease as it progresses along its ugly path to destroy us, David Sadava clearly and elegantly explains all of this to give us a clear picture of where we are at and what hope lies in the future.

Hard to Finish

I didn't make it all the way through this one. I know the images are probably included as a PDF, but this was really the kind of lecture where I would need to be looking at the images in real time while the lecturer is speaking. The focus is so narrowly on science that the lecturer refers to horrific situations with zero emotion, and does not address anything about the social experience of cancer.

Good content but support materials absent

Excellent and knowledgable lecturer but the charts, diagrams and graphs referred to multiple times in the lectures are NOT available on the pdf, which is a disappointing oversight. When contacted, both Audible and Great Courses disavow responsibility. This oversight greatly detracts from the overall benefit of this series of lectures.

A lot of his initial assumptions were incorrect

I am also a scientist and it is well known that a lot of his initial assumptions that he mentioned more than once were incorrect. For a modern course that’s an excusable. A lot of his information was right on and OK but his initial assumptions are very flawed causing a few problems with the conclusions.