From crude surgery to gene editing: how cancer treatments evolved over the years
A little more than two centuries ago, an English novelist named Frances Burney endured a “terrible operation” to remove a tumour after having breast cancer diagnosed. Burney spent more than 17 agonising minutes under the scalpel as her surgeon in Paris cut away at her breast – all without anaesthetic. She was 58 when the mastectomy was performed and lived another three decades, a happy outcome that went against the terrible odds faced by cancer patients at the time. Fast forward to today and the cancer treatments being contemplated by Prof Dan Peer at Tel Aviv University in Israel a...