Dr. Azra Raza has dedicated her life to studying cancer, and to making the unbearable easier to bear. In The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, Raza gives a searing account of the current state of cancer and its impacts on real people, including herself. She describes how she bore the terrible burden of being her own husband’s oncologist as he succumbed to leukemia, and how this personal experience shaped her approach to research. With a mixture of scholarship and empathy, hope and despair, Raza examines how both medicine and our society mistreats cancer, how we can do better, and why we must.