Alexander Masters

Alexander Masters is a British biographer, screenwriter and illustrator. His first book, Stuart: A Life Backwards, won the Guardian First Book Award and the Hawthornden Prize and was made into a film for HBO and BBC starring Tom Hardy and Benedict Cumberbatch.

His second biography, The Genius in My Basement, tells the story of the brilliant, eccentric mathematician Simon Norton, who lived in the basement of the house where Masters rented a flat. This is the official website — the books, the reviews, the film, and notes from the author.

Featured

£2 million campaign for cancer therapy

A virus that kills cancer?

This links to an articleI've just published in the Telegraph Saturday magazine, about a potential new cancer treatment from Sweden. Developed by Professor Magnus Essand and Dr Justyna Leja at the University of Uppsala (just north of Stockholm) the therapy is a type of virus that has been adapted to target neuroendocrine cancer, which is the type of tumour Steve Jobs had.

Steve Jobs' disease was pancreatic NEUROENDOCRINE cancer, not ordinary pancreatic cancer.

From the article:

It sounds too kindly of the gods to be true: a virus that eats cancer.

‘I sometimes use the phrase “an assassin who kills all the bad guys”,’ agrees Professor Essand, contentedly.

Cheap to produce, exquisitely precise, with only mild, flu-like side-effects in humans. Photographs in research reports show tumours in test mice melting away.

‘It is amazing,’ gleams Essand in satisfied wonder. ‘It’s better than anything else. Tumour cell lines that are resistant to every other drug, it kills them in these animals.’

The University of Uppsala is a European Centre of Excellence for the treatment of Steve Jobs Disease. Yet, ironically, this new discovery is about to be thrown out because of lack of funds to test the virus in humans. The researchers are just £2 million short of being able to set up a clinical trial, the essential first step to getting a new cancer therapy out to patients. To put that in context, Apple makes this much profit every 28 minutes ...

From the article:

To geneticists, the science makes perfect sense. It is a fact of human biology that healthy cells are programmed to die when they become infected by a virus, because this prevents the virus spreading to other parts of the body. But a cancerous cell is immortal; through its mutations it has somehow managed to turn off the bits of its genetic programme that enforce cell suicide. This means that, if a suitable virus infects a cancer cell, it could continue to replicate inside it uncontrollably, and causes the cell to ‘lyse’ – or, in non-technical language, tear apart. The progeny viruses then spread to other cancer cells nearby and repeat the process. A virus becomes, in effect, a cancer of cancer. In Professor Essand’s lab studies his virus surges through the bloodstreams of test animals, grabbing and rupturing cancerous cells with Viking rapacity.

For a million pounds, you can have this new virus

named in your honour (or anybody else's honour)

See this editorial and this article about it in the

Financial Times

(there is a selection on the paywall that allows

you to read 8 articles for free every montb)

What costs the million pounds (four two-hundred-and-fifteenths or less than 2% of the price of Francis Bacon’s ‘Triptych 1976’) that Magnus needs to bring this medicine to patients is not the production, but the health and safety paperwork to get the trials started. Trials come in three phases. What Magnus was suggesting for his trifling million pounds (two Mont Blanc diamond-encrusted pens) was not just a Phase I trial, but also a Phase II, which, all being well, would bring the virus right up to the point where a big pharmaceutical company would pay ten or a hundred times as much to take it over and organise the Phase III trial required by law to presage full-scale drug development.

‘So, if Calvin Klein or Elton John or … Paris Hilton stumped up a million, could they have the virus named after them?’

‘Why not?’ nodded Magnus, showing me the bacteria incubator, which looks like an industrial clothes washer, only less complicated. ‘We can make an even better one for two million.’

The article is written to launch a fundraising campaign to bring this breakthrough treatment to a clinical trial - that's the only way to find out if it will be as effective in humans as it is in lab studies.

To donate money to Professor Magnus Essand’s

research group’s work on viral treatments for

neuroendocrine cancer, go to

www.uu.se/en/support/oncolytic.

Contributions will be acknowledged in scientific publications and in association with the clinical trial. To have the virus named in your honour requires a donation of one million pounds.

What is Pancreatic Neuroendocrine Cancer?

Nothing is certain - that's the number one cancer cliché. I went with Dido to the doctors's surgery to hear the details of the diagnosis. The GP seemed quite chirpy. Further tests had revealed that it was pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer - still cancer, still frequently fatal - but a whistle of relief. It's what Steve Jobs had, and why he invented the ipad, the iphone, Apple TV. If he'd had the ordinary pancreatic cancer that most newspapers insist on giving him, he'd have died before the MacBook. If he'd taken his doctor's advice and not waited nine months until starting proper treatment instead of going on Buddhist diets, he could well be alive now.

From The Guardian, an article I wrote about Dido Davies, my friend and co-writer who has pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer. She has also written under the pseudonym Rachel Swift.

To find out more about neuroendocrine cancer, of the pancreas or of anywhere else, visit the NET Patient Foundation. 'NET' stands for NeuroEndocrine Tumour.

These are also excellent sites: The Carcinoid Cancer Foundation in the US (where this type of tumour is still called by the old-fashioned name of 'carcinoid') and CNETS Canada.

All of these sites are extremely informative and maintained by experts in the subject. They each provide patient stories, useful links, basic information, and are run by remarkable campaigners who have performed miracles to raise awareness about neuroendocrine cancer, and funding for research.

Books

Simon, the genius in my basement

Click here to see a video of Simon Norton grudgingly visiting the printers with me to see The Genius in my Basement coming off the presses last year. This was at Clays, in Bungay, where they print 180,000,000 volumes a year. For a moment, even Simon was impressed.

Wednesday 7th, book launch in London today! Part of it will be on a Routemaster bus, along a route devised by Simon, though he wasn't very interested in thinking about it. He thought he might not bother turning up at the launch, in fact, because the gasman might be dropping in to look at his boiler today.

Reviews of Simon: the genius in my basement:

The Sunday Times: 'An astonishingly good book ... glorious: funny, surprising and completely sui generis.'

The Sunday Times Books of the Year: 'Once again, Masters perfectly negotiates the space between intrustion and revelation.'

Mail on Sunday: 'Curious, jokey, companionable, wholly original ... has the exuberant playfulness of book by Kurt Vonnegut.'

Daily Telegraph: 'Against the odds, Masters has managed to convey something of the beauty and mystery not just of mathematics but of the human spirit'

The Jewish Chronicle: 'The most original book I have read in a long time. It is relentlessly amusing, deeply complex ... I am still delving into the pages, randomnly selecting chuckle-worthy snatches of prose. Between the only partially suppressed hilarity of the two men's combative dialogue and the frustration of the author, emerges a book of compelling brilliance'

The Guardian,Books of the Year: 'Not only a kind, funny account of a stunningly odd man, but into the bargain educates the reader about higher maths'

The Daily Telegraph: 'Masters is a biographer driven to unpick stereotypes and restore his subjects to their compled humanity with idiosyncratic wit, genuine compassion and refreshing bewilderment'

Financial Times: 'This book has the magnetic power of Sherlock Holmes stories, which we read not so much for the solution to the mystery as to enjoy the otherness of Holmes ... This is both a happy and a funny book. It is decorated with Masters' elegant cartoons and his language is lyrical and vernal'

The Observer: 'A comically tender portrait, emerging through [a] process of mutual exchange'

The Times: 'The democratisation of biography: that is what Masters helped to achieve [in Stuart: A Life Backwards]. Masters' new book is once again rooted in this inspirational genre ... an absorbing read'

London Evening Standard: '... this book is a complete success. That is, in producing something that enlarges not only our understanding of Group Theory (Masters, although possessing a first-class degree in physics and applied mathematics, concedes that he is a speck in the distance compared with Norton), but something higher up in our priorities: an understanding of the human mind, and an enlargement of our sympathies.'

Evening StandardBooks of the Year:'Superb: droll, original, sympathetic and studded with brilliant turns of phrase. it also gave the best account I've read of what it actually is that mathematicians do, and why they do it.'

The Daily Mail:'Simon, it must be said, is a deeply endearing man.'

The Guardian:'... delightful – the bloggy, scrapbooky aspect, the kipple and backchat and disgusting food. In her still-unsurpassed The Last Samurai – another tale of childhood prodigiousness – the novelist Helen DeWitt imagines "the writers of the future" learning to do with words what Cézanne and Schoenberg were doing close on a century ago with painting and music, and in its best moments Masters's work has something of that excitement, something new and open and risky and humane.'

Book of the Week in The Times and The Week

Stuart, a life backwards

1024x768 Normal 0 false false false

To donate money to Professor Magnus Essand’s research group’s work on viral
treatments for neuroendocrine cancer, please send contributions to Uppsala
University, The Oncolytic Virus Fund, Box 256, SE-751 05 Uppsala , Sweden , or
go to www.uu.se/en/support/oncolytic. Contributions will be acknowledged in
scientific publications and in association with the clinical trial. To
have the virus named in your honour requires a donation of one million
pounds.