A Commotion in the Blood

Recommended by Eric Smith, Director of Translational Research, Immune Effector Cell Therapies, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School

While it may be a bit too on the nose given my day job, this book is much more than a fantastic introduction to translational immunotherapy from the days of William Coley to what was state of the art when it was published in 1997. Hall does an amazing job weaving a story, whose stars in this case are the real-life physicians and scientists pushing the limit of what was known about the immune system at the time to treat disease. One can easily see shades of this style of writing in those who came after him (e.g., Siddhartha Mukherjee, Charles Graeber) with similar approaches to telling riveting history of medicine stories. Hall’s book is not only fun to read and revealing, it is prophetic in that no one could possibly have known in 1997 that immunotherapy would change how we treat cancer starting 15 years later. The concept of standing on the shoulders of giants leaps off the page.