“In his last years, Steven P. Jobs veered from exotic diets to cutting-edge treatments as he fought the cancer that ultimately took his life, according to a new biography to be published on Monday,” Steve Lohr reports for The New York Times. “A copy of the book was obtained by The New York Times before it officially went on sale.”
“His early decision to put off surgery and rely instead on fruit juices, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments — some of which he found on the Internet — infuriated and distressed his family, friends and physicians, the book says,” Lohr reports. “From the time of his first diagnosis in October 2003, until he received surgery in July 2004, he kept his condition largely private — secret from Apple employees, executives and shareholders, who were misled.”
MacDailyNews Take: Seriously? Were people “misled” or were they just not privy to a man’s private health information? Lohr should stick to reporting and refrain from making judgements.
“Friends, family members and physicians spoke to Mr. Isaacson openly about Mr. Jobs’s illness and his shifting strategy for managing it. According to Mr. Isaacson, Mr. Jobs was one of 20 people in the world to have all the genes of his cancer tumor and his normal DNA sequenced. The price tag at the time: $100,000,” Lohr reports. “Mr. Jobs put off surgery for nine months, a fact first reported in 2008 in Fortune magazine. Friends and family, including his sister, Mona Simpson, urged Mr. Jobs to have surgery and chemotherapy.”
“When he did take the path of surgery and science, Mr. Jobs did so with passion and curiosity, sparing no expense, pushing the frontiers of new treatments. According to Mr. Isaacson, once Mr. Jobs decided on the surgery and medical science, he became an expert — studying, guiding and deciding on each treatment. Mr. Isaacson said Mr. Jobs made the final decision on each new treatment regimen,” Lohr reports. “The DNA sequencing that Mr. Jobs ultimately went through was done by a collaboration of teams at Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Harvard and the Broad Institute of MIT. The sequencing, Mr. Isaacson writes, allowed doctors to tailor drugs and target them to the defective molecular pathways.”
Lohr reports, “A doctor told Mr. Jobs that the pioneering treatments of the kind he was undergoing would soon make most types of cancer a manageable chronic disease. Later, Mr. Jobs told Mr. Isaacson that he was either going to be one of the first ‘to outrun a cancer like this’” or be among the last ‘to die from it.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Steve Jobs via Apple’s iBookstore (U.S.16.99) here: Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
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