Watts Riots

by William H. Benson

August 11, 2016

     Daniel Moynihan sbumitted his report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, in March of 1965, and five months later, on August 11, 1965, the Watts riots broke out. In 1965, Moynihan was a young assistant secretary of Labor working in the Johnson administration. Eleven years later, in 1976, he would win the election to the Senate from the state of New York and serve as the distinguished Senator there for three terms.

     Like many Americans of Irish heritage, Moynihan spoke his mind, and it showed in his report. He warned the nation of the rising illegitimacy rates, and the “tangle of pathology” that threatened the stability of African-American families. He said,

     “But there is one truly great discontinuity in family structure in the United States at the present time; that is between the white world in general and that of the Negro American. The white family has achieved a high degree of stability and is maintaining that stability.

     “By contrast, the family structure of lower class Negroes is highly unstable, and in many urban centers is approaching a complete breakdown. Nearly a quarter of Negro women living in cities, who have ever married, are divorced, separated, or are living apart from their husbands.”

    Today urban scholars look back at the Moynihan report and say that Daniel “cast a black crisis as one of national import[ance] that demanded a national response.” And yet, the national response was far less than overwhelming.

     On August 11, 1965, a Los Angeles policeman named Lee Minikus pulled over a 21-year-old black man named Marquette Frye for drunk driving near the corner of Avalon Boulevard and 116^th Street, just north of the U. S. Highway 105 in Watts, a dozen miles south of downtown Los Angeles. Frye’s mother came to the scene of the arrest, and she assaulted Officer Minikus.

     A crowd gathered, and people began throwing rocks. The altercation escalated into a riot. For the next six days the LAPD, the California Highway Patrol, and the National Guard worked to restore order, as some 30,000 people rioted, looted buildings, and burnt properties. In its wake, thirty-four people lay dead, 1032 were injured, and 3438 were arrested.

     Sergeant Ben Dunn said, “The streets of Watts resembled an all-out war zone in some far-off foreign country. It bore no resemblance to the United States of America.”

     Commentators later pinned the blame for the riot’s fierce intensity upon inadequate housing. For decades, the African-American people of Los Angeles endured the most blatant form of racial discrimination. They could not purchase or rent a home outside their segregated area, because realtors and landlords would block the sale or the lease. The people felt stuck, excluded from the suburbs, and restricted to the Watts and Compton areas, a dozen miles south of downtown Los Angeles.

     In 1963, California’s Congress recognized the problem and passed the Rumford Fair Housing Act in order to end residential segregation based upon racial discrimination, but then the following year, California’s voters put on the ballot Proposition 14, an amendment to California’s constitution that repealed the Rumford Fair Housing Act and legalized discrimination.

     The African-American people were outraged. The black activist, Bayard Rustin, published his Watts Manifesto in March of 1966, and said, “The whole point of the outbreak in Watts was that it marked the first major rebellion of Negroes against their own masochism and was carried on with the express purpose of asserting that they they would no longer quietly submit to the deprivation of slum life.”

     One young black man who called Watts his home was Stan Sanders. He had graduated from Jordan High School, less than two miles from where Marquette Frye was arrested. He received a scholarship to attend Whittier College, won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford, and was enrolled at Yale Law School when Watts exploded. He had refused to “quietly submit to the deprivation of slum life.”

     Tom Brokaw first met Stan Sanders in the summer of 1966. In 2007, Brokaw published his book, Boom! Voices of the Sixties, and in it he asked Sanders about his memories of the Watts riots.

     “I blame the way we reacted to the Watts riots,” Sanders said. “If low educational levels were a primary cause of poverty, why didn’t we pour in massive amounts of educational aid? When I went there, Jordan High was a decent school. I visited recently, and now it’s just a joke. There’s no real teaching. Kids can’t read. We kind of gave up.”

     Brokaw commented, “The combination of the dissolution of the black family structure in too many neighborhoods, the loss of parental involvement in the education of too many black children, and the indifference of the majority community adds up to warehousing, not educating.”

     Two final points: Proposition 14 remained in effect until voters repealed it in 1974, and Daniel Moynihan’s father, John Henry Moynihan, deserted the family when Daniel was ten years old. He knew firsthand the devastating consequences of an unstable home life. 

Terror

by William H. Benson

July 28, 2016

     The Scottish writer and thinker Thomas Carlyle planned to write a massive three-volume history of the French Revolution. He drafted the first volume and then asked his friend John Stuart Mill to review it. Mill’s housekeeper mistook Carlyle’s pages for trash and pitched them into the fire. About that housekeeper, one can say, “She, or he, cleaned too well.”

     One can imagine the ugly emotions that surged within Carlyle felt after Mill told him that his draft was gone, destroyed, burnt up: horror, disappointment, outrage, panic, even terror. The unthinkable had happened. Carlyle though was made of sterner stuff. He shelved those emotions long enough to write his second and third volumes first before he tackled, for a second time, his destroyed first volume.

     Once completed, in 1837, Thomas Carlyle published The French Revolution, and in it he sketched scenes of people caught up in the revolution’s unfolding and unpredictable events. One reviewer said that Carlyle “paints a grim description of the complete and utter chaos of the time.”

     His readers feel the same exhilaration that the French people felt when people stormed the Bastille, the royal fortress and prison in Paris, on July 14, 1789. Here, they believed, was a chance for a new political order. Carlyle then describes the “daze and trance that the Terror’s victims felt,” as one by one they were led to the guillotine, including the king, Louis XVI, and his queen, Marie Antoinette, in 1793, as well as the Great Terror’s architect, Robespierre, the following year.

     Terror comes in at least two forms: by human design, and by nature.

     At 5:41 p.m., on Sunday afternoon on May 22, 2011, a tornado touched down on Joplin, Missouri’s  west edge and then marched east for six miles, cutting a swath of havoc and destruction through the heart of the city. The tornado’s horrific winds approached speeds of up to 200 miles per hour, and that Sunday afternoon 160 people died.

     Working at a Fastrip gas station and convenience store that day was Ruben Carter, a recent college graduate. As the storm worsened, Ruben took command and ordered all those inside the store to assemble in the beer cooler. “Women and children first,” he shouted above the storm’s roar.

     A reporter said, “Some of the people in the cooler are screaming, and some are crying, and some are completely quiet. And then the tornado, and not just the storm preceding it, crests the hill, and hits them with its full force. It is a terrible sound. As Ruben pulls the cooler’s door shut, he sees the entire front of his store, now that it’s been unmoored, suddenly shoot skyward, like a rocket.”

     The tornado destroyed the gas station that day, leaving in its wake a pile of jagged rubble, but twenty-three people crawled out of that beer cooler and stared in amazement at the destruction outside. They were the lucky ones. They survived. Others elsewhere in Joplin had also hid in coolers, but Carter said, “it had not worked out so well for them.”

     Terror. It hits people hard. A pounding in the chest. A shortness of breath. A realization dawns that this too “may not work out so well for us.”

     In the 1940’s, the Nazi’s marched millions toward the gas chambers, the most outrageous and appalling fact of human conduct in recorded history. On 9-11, thousands inside the twin towers, the Pentagon, and on the four aircraft felt sheer and absolute terror, in an instant. Did any of those victims dare to believe that it would work out well for them?

     Today, news and terror are linked arm-in-arm. To read the news is to read terror, whether in America or in Europe or in the Middle East. In the United States, another school shooting causes consternation and bewilderment. On our city’s streets, we hear and see policemen brawling with young men, and their battles, like the wild west, end in gun shots that kill and wound each other.

     In Europe, the citizens of Paris, Brussels, Nice, and now Munich, just this last week, have felt the emotional impact of a terrorist’s rampage. Mohammed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove a truck into a crowd at Nice, France, on July 14, Bastille Day, France’s national holiday, while people watched the fireworks. His handiwork ended 84 innocent people’s lives. 

    And after the storm passes, and after the rampage ends, then what? Well then, at that point peace breaks out. The sun shines. Normal life returns. The living bury the dead and rebuild their homes. They write a second time their destroyed manuscripts. Human beings possess this astonishing capacity to rebuild that which others or nature have destroyed.

     A historian once asked, “What are the long-term consequences of the French Revolution?” Another historian provided a flippant answer, “It is too soon to tell.” Today we ask ourselves, “What are the long-term consequences of these series of violent and random terrorist rampages?” We answer, “It is way too soon to tell.”

A Foolish Consistency

by William H. Benson

July 14, 2016

     Last week, I happened to hear Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast on two former NBA players, Wilt Chamberlain and Rick Barry. Gladwell, the author of the best-sellers—The Tipping Point and Outliers—noticed that Wilt Chamberlain holds the record for the most free-throws made in a single game, 28 out of 32, on March 2, 1962, the night he made 100 points, another NBA record. Yet, over his entire career, Wilt the Stilt only made 51.1% of his free-throws.

     Gladwell wondered about that anomaly. What did Wilt Chamberlain do different that one night? The answer: he shot his 32 free-throws underhand, holding the ball with both hands, but down low, between his knees, “a granny style,” instead of overhand, the standard free-throw shot. For a time then, Wilt shot underhand, but then later he reverted back to the overhand shot, and his percentage dropped.

     Why did he stop? Wilt explained, “I felt like a sissy.”

     Gladwell insists that the underhand shot is the more accurate method, and yet few, if any, college or NBA basketball players shoot that way, and their percentage-of-shots-made stands at about 70%.

     Rick Barry played professional basketball for fourteen seasons, won the national title in 1975 playing for the Golden State warriors, and he shot most all of his free-throws underhand. “At the time of his retirement in 1980, his .900 free throw percentage ranked first in NBA history.”

     When Rick was young, his dad encouraged him to shoot underhanded, but Rick complained, “Dad, that’s a sissy shot.” His father replied, “Son, they can’t make fun of you if you’re making your shots.” Rick was convinced, and from then on he did not care what other players or fans said about his style.

     Gladwell said that Rick is a guy who does not bow to peer pressure, to the current wisdom, and who “is not looking around the room, checking the temperature, before saying or doing anything.”

     Gladwell provides other examples of commonly-accepted ideas that if challenged, may prove false.

     He wonders why most football teams punt on fourth down rather than run or pass the ball. He is convinced that if teams would fire their punter, they would “win one or two more games each season.” Perhaps, he is correct, but others say it depends upon the team’s offensive strength, as well as the opposing team’s defensive strength.

     Gladwell also suggests that NFL teams should avoid the first round draft picks because of their extreme price and their record of disappointment. General managers will find the future stars, Gladwell says, in the later rounds. For example, the New England Patriots picked Tom Brady in the seventh round, the 199^th pick, of the 2000 draft.

     Who among us dares to question and test every idea in the market place of ideas? Gladwell talks about a person’s “threshold,” that moment when she or he lays aside all fear of rejection, all taunts and laughter, all peer pressure, and says or does something another way.

     Historians know that the conventional wisdom has not always proven itself correct, but that it changes, as the generations change. It is the historian who identifies and measures that change.

     In the United States, slavery was once an accepted practice, written into the texts of state and national constitutions. It took the fierce intensity of an abolitionist like William Lloyd Douglas, the political skill of Abraham Lincoln, and a bloody civil war to stomp out that miserable institution.

     Although conditions have improved, human beings all over the world still today must confront racism, segregation, gender discrimination, sexism, exploitation, and tyranny. It is the duty of a courageous man or a woman to challenge those mind-numbing attitudes that smother human creativity.

    Early in the twentieth century, most people were unaware of the health consequences of prolonged tobacco use. “The U.S. Army included cigarettes in soldiers’ rations until 1975.” The conventional thought for decades, that tobacco use was harmless, was proved wrong.

     Human beings kill animals, both the domesticated and wild types. Farmers kill rattlesnakes and prairie dogs. Trappers trap coyotes. For centuries hunters shot and killed this continent’s immense buffalo herds, almost to extinction, but they did drive to extinction the passenger pigeon.

     One person who disagreed with the wanton slaughter of this planet’s rich animal life was Albert Schweitzer. His compassion extended to all life forms, down to the pesky insects; he refused to kill any life form, anything with a will-to-live, after he moved to Africa. He called his philosophy, “a Reverence for Life.” He believed all life forms sacred, and his fundamental principle of morality: “It is good to maintain and cherish life; it is evil to destroy and check life.”

There are always other ways to act. Circumstances change, new technologies and products arrive at the market place, and life-enhancing opinions force themselves forward for others to notice. It takes courage to try something different. Some like Rick Barry embrace the notion. Others, like Wilt Chamberlain, try it for a while, feel ashamed, and quit. Most though refuse to try.

Human Migration

by William H. Benson

June 30, 2016

     A constant in human affairs is migration. Ever since the days of Mitochondrial Eve, the mother of us all, Homo Sapiens have moved, migrated, and transported themselves toward the illusive distant horizon. According to paleontologists’ best estimates, Eve’s descendents departed Africa within the last 80,000 years, followed the Indian Ocean’s coastline, spread across Asia, and then stepped onto the North American continent as recent as fifteen thousand years ago.

      Then, within the last forty thousand years, another batch of Eve’s descendents, departed Africa and veered west into Europe, where they encountered the Neanderthals, whom the Homo Sapiens proceeded to kill off or welcome into their own families, but no one is sure.

     Over the past two or three millennium, several peoples have laid claim to the British Isles. First, there were the Celts in the years before Christ; then, Julius Caesar and his Romans in the first century; then, northern Europe’s Germanic tribes —the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians—in the fifth century; then, the Vikings in about 1000 A. D.; and, finally, the French Normans. Each group thought it their duty to cross the English Chanel and conquer the people already there.

     I am sure there is a lesson somewhere in this history, in light of the Brexit vote last Thursday. One British commentator said, “God dug the bloody Channel for us, so why do we keep trying to fill it in?”

     Another constant: migration leads to conflict. One displaced person explained it, “These people came out of nowhere, after we had lived there for eons, and they said that they now owned our land.”

      Certain cultures have built the memory of their long ago migration into their religion and psyche. Jewish people say the words to the Passover Haggadah, “We ourselves went out from Egypt,” and in the midrash, they say, “All generations stood together at Sinai.”

     Reasons for migration fall into one of two categories: either a “push” or a “pull.” People find themselves pushed out because of a lack of jobs, few opportunities, insufficient land, inadequate living conditions, a hostile climate, famine, drought, fear of persecution, slavery, natural disasters, a poor chance to marry, or war. People are pulled to new lands because of better employment, an excellent education, religious or political freedom, or a more attractive climate.

     For example, Gambia’s youth are fleeing their small African nation because of Gambia’s dictator, Yahya Jammeh, who, The Week reported, “is erratic and brutal even by African standards. He claims to be able to cure HIV, ‘though only on Thursdays,’ and he threatens to personally slit the throats of gays.” As a result, Gambia is “one of the world’s leaders in producing refugees.” Many have fled to Europe.

     Even more tragic is the Syrian civil war between Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s ruler, and the rebels. Now in its sixth year, the war has displaced millions. Five million Syrians are stranded in Turkey, Lebanon, or Jordan; and another seven million are displaced inside Syria, and would migrate, if they could. Europe though has hesitated to open its doors to the Syrians, who are caught in the war’s cross-fires.

     On August 4, 1942, at World War II’s beginning, when many young men were leaving the family farms to serve in the military, the U.S. and Mexico signed an agreement, called the Bracero Program. By it, Mexican laborers legally entered into the United States to work on the country’s farms. They were paid thirty cents per hour, and authorities expected them to return to Mexico after the harvest.

     The program created a problem, that of undocumented laborers, those who did not bother with pursuing work here through the proper channels. By 1952, 1.5 million Mexican workers lived and worked in the United States, but did so illegally. Many were rounded up and deported. Then, on December 31, 1964, the Bracero Program officially ended, but the need for laborers still continued.

     One journalist wrote, “The allure of American prosperity combined with the desperation of the unemployed Mexicans worked together to create a problem too big for both governments to control.”

     The Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, now wants to stop all human migration between the U.S and Mexico. He begins with a worthwhile goal, to “secure our border,” but then he jumps to an unworkable solution, build a 1,300-mile wall, and, he says, “Mexico will pay for it.”

     The U. S. has spent millions just trying to build a fence between the two countries, and it has failed to stem the tide of migrants daring to seek jobs in America. A wall would cost far more, perhaps $10 billion, but the U. S. taxpayer would pay for it, because Mexico’s government would refuse.

     No one likes to feel pushed aside, and yet the Native Americans, the Palestinians, the Celts, the Neanderthals, the Syrians, and the Gambians have felt pushed off and out of their native lands. For tens of thousands of years, persecuted peoples have packed their bags and fled, and if people sense job opportunities elsewhere, they too will pack up and leave. A wall will not stop human migration.

     The difference between Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. Ronald Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down the wall.” Donald Trump says, “I will build a wall, and I will make Mexico pay for it.”   

Father’s Day

Lincoln vs. Montaigne

by William H. Benson

June 16, 2016

     Abraham Lincoln’s father, Tom, was of a different substance than his son. Tom uprooted his family again and again. They moved from Kentucky to Indiana to Illinois, and in each he expected his son to help him build a home and a farm. There were trees to chop down, fences and cabins to build, stumps and boulders to dig up, seeds to plant, and grains to harvest in the fall. It was nonstop work.

     One of Lincoln’s biographers said, “Abraham Lincoln was like a slave to his father.” As Tom’s health and eyesight failed him, he came to depend upon young Abe’s strong back and arms, and then he sent his son to work in the neighbors’ fields to generate a few coins that Tom then collected and spent. Hence, Abraham’s chilling words written years later, “I used to be a slave.”

     Indeed, the domineering Tom Lincoln exploited his son’s skills with an axe, his ability to wrestle a rock or a stump out of the ground, and his command of a horse hitched to a plow. Abraham Lincoln detested all the work and said, “My father taught me to work, but he never taught me to love it. I never did like to work, and I won’t deny it.”

     In Indiana, Tom was a leader in the Baptist church, located just a mile across the Lincolns’ field. Another of Lincoln’s biographers said, that as a teen-ager, “Abraham lived in an atmosphere that out-Calvined Calvin himself.” The pulpit, the pew, and the plow loomed large in young Abraham’s life.

     When still a young man, Abraham set upon a course of reading and self-education that lasted until his final days. He rejected Tom’s monotonous farm work and his terrifying religion. Instead, Abraham sought to learn about life and ideas beyond his wretched existence. He wanted to read books, to ponder others’ thoughts, and to consider other pursuits in life. Soon, he took up the study of law.

     David Herbert Donald said of Lincoln, “In all his published writings, and indeed, even in reports of hundreds of stories and conversations, he had not one favorable word to say about his father.” When Abraham married Mary Todd, he did not invite Tom to the wedding, and Tom never met Mary or their children. When Tom passed away, Abraham did not attend the funeral.

     Now contrast the Lincolns’ estranged father / son relationship with that of the sixteenth-century thinker and writer, Michel de Montaigne and his father, Pierre.

     Pierre first hired a Latin tutor and then a Greek instructor for Michel, who grew up in a state of “constant intellectual and spiritual stimulation.” Because his father never expected him to work on the estate’s fields, Michel learned nothing of field work.

    He admitted, “I can hardly distinguish between the cabbages and lettuces in my garden. I don’t even know the names of the chief implements of husbandry, nor the rude principles of agriculture, which every boy knows.”

     Pierre hired a musician to play his lute every morning to awaken Michel in a most gentle and soothing manner, because he believed “that it troubles the tender brains of children to wake them in the morning with a start, and to snatch them suddenly and violently from their sleep.”

     Whereas Lincoln had a slim chance for a superior education, and Tom expected him to work hard, Michel had the best education, and Pierre never expected Michel to work in any field.

     Montaigne retired early, to his country estate at Bordeaux on February 28, 1571, on his 38^th birthday, because, he said, he was “long weary of the service of the Court and of public employments.” There, he jotted down his essays for the next twenty-one years. Lincoln’s self-improvement scheme propelled him into the White House, and he never enjoyed any retirement.

     The difference in the two parenting styles reminds me of Johnny Cash’s song “A Boy Named Sue.” 

     “Well, my daddy left home when I was three, and he didn’t leave much to Ma and me, . . . But the meanest thing that he ever did was before he left, he went and named me ‘Sue.’ It seems I had to fight my whole life through. Some gal would giggle, and I’d get red. Some guy’d laugh, and I’d bust his head. I tell ya. Life ain’t easy for a boy named ‘Sue.’”

     Then, one day Sue meets his father in a saloon, challenges him, and the two grown men fight. Sue’s father then explains to Sue that he ought to thank him “for the gravel in ya guts and the spit in ya eye, because I named you Sue.” Sue then says, “I came away with a different point of view.”

     Unlike the fictional boy named Sue, Lincoln was constant in his rejection of his father, and all the arduous work, and when Abraham had children, he was loving and most indulgent. On the other hand, Montaigne was constant in his appreciation of Pierre and called him, “The best father that ever was.”

     What can we take from this? That certain parenting styles are ill-suited for certain children. I wonder though, “If Tom Lincoln had loved Abraham and directed his son’s education like Pierre had done for Michel, would Abraham have achieved all that he did?” I wonder.   

     On Sunday, celebrate Father’s Day, perhaps at a picnic in the park, and think of your father.

Cancer

by William H. Benson

June 2, 2016

     Beau Biden, the Vice-President’s son, passed away on Saturday, May 30, 2015, a year ago, of brain cancer. He was 46. In January, of this year, in his final State of the Union Address, President Obama announced that he was naming his Vice-President, Joseph Biden, to spearhead his “moonshot effort to cure cancer,” part of the president’s $202 million Precision Medicine Initiative.

     Two weeks ago, The New York Times Magazine ran a special series of articles entitled, “The New Anatomy of Cancer,” and a journalist named Sam Apple wrote a most interesting article.

     In it, Apple described “the Warburg effect.” A mid-twentieth century biochemist named Otto Warburg, who survived the Holocaust, noticed that cancer cells drawn from a rat tumor did not require oxygen to multiply. Instead, those cancer cells gobbled up “enormous amounts of glucose (blood sugar) and broke it down without oxygen,” which made no sense to Otto, because there was plenty of oxygen available. “The cancer cells,” he noted, “were ravenous only for glucose.”

     In a normal cell’s cytoplasm, glucose is converted into a form called pyruvate that then passes into the cell’s mitochondria, where it is burned in the presence of oxygen to create abundant amounts of energy. Scientists call this process “respiration.”

     But in a cancer cell, the mitochondria are by-passed, knocked out of the process, and the cell ignores the oxygen. Instead, the cell stuffs itself with glucose again and again. “Unlike healthy cells, growing cancer cells are missing the internal feedback loops that are designed to conserve resources.”

     This frenzied gorging upon glucose produces a waste product in the cell called lactic acid that passes into the liver, where it is broken down a second time to create more glucose. The cancer cells then gobble up the reconstituted glucose. This perpetual cycle will, at some point, overwhelm the host’s body. Scientists call this process “fermentation.”

     Healthy respiration vs. unhealthy fermentation.

     Apple said that the “positron emission tomography,” or the PET scan, “works by revealing the places in the body where the cells are consuming extra glucose.” In simple words, if you find the areas where there is a rapid uptake of glucose, there you will find the cancer.

     Warburg’s research was dropped from cancer textbooks with the advent of genetic research. James Watson and Francis Crick discovered DNA’s curving double helix structure in 1953, and the pursuit was on to discover the genetic mutations that lead to cancer’s several forms and structures. Researchers believed then that if they discovered the mutated genes, they would find the path to a cure.

     In recent days, Apple met with James Watson, now 88, who admitted that “locating the genes that cause cancer has been ‘remarkably unhelpful,’” and that “the belief that sequencing your DNA is going to extend your life [is] ‘a cruel illusion.’” In other words, an oncologist may know the specific mutated gene that causes a type of cancer, but that knowledge does not clear the path to a cure or a therapy. 

     Certain researchers today have renewed their focus upon Otto Warburg’s work on metabolism. One who has done so is Lewis Cantley, who has discovered a tentative connection between diabetes and cancer. Their commonality is “elevated levels of insulin, that is produced in the pancreas.” Insulin’s job is to tell cells to take up an excess of glucose, if detected in the blood. Cantley says that “cancer cells behave as though insulin were telling it to take up glucose all the time and to grow.”

     A drug of promise is “metformin,” a drug that diabetics now take to reduce their blood sugar. Apple says, “Diabetics who take metformin seem less likely to develop cancer than diabetics who don’t.” 

     In 2010, a young oncologist named Siddhartha Mukherjee published his best-seller, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, that won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction the next year. Mukherjee says that he wrote his book in response to a patient’s complaint. “I’m willing to go on fighting,” he said, “but I need to know what it is that I’m fighting.”

     Mukherjee calls his work “a dismal discipline.” He describes his first meetings with new patients as “hyper-acute.” He writes, “It’s a moment when you get to erase everything that’s irrelevant and ask the most elemental questions—about survival, family, children, legacy.”

     The President’s Precision Medicine Initiative is a step in the right direction, but researchers know more is needed. One writer said, “Does anyone truly imagine prevailing without bringing the fight everywhere—without matching cancer in its inventiveness, its nimbleness, its sheer relentlessness?”

     “Relay for Life,” the American Cancer Society’s fund-raising program, occurs once a year. Let us run, not walk, at this year’s relay.