Steve Jobs was one of only 20 people in the world to have his DNA sequenced as well as the DNA of his tumor, Walter Isaacson’s upcoming biography reveals.
After Jobs delayed treatment for cancer for nine months while he tried alternative cures (including eating vegetarian dishes at a San Francisco restaurant with Dr. Dean Ornish), he went all in with the best treatments modern medicine can provide.
Because of the experimental gene therapy, Jobs said he’d either be one of the first to beat cancer, or one of the last to die of it.
According to Mr. Isaacson, Mr. Jobs was one of 20 people in the world to have all the genes of his cancer tumor and his normal DNA sequenced…
When he did take the path of surgery and science, Mr. Jobs did so with passion and curiosity, sparing no expense, pushing the frontiers of new treatments. According to Mr. Isaacson, once Mr. Jobs decided on the surgery and medical science, he became an expert — studying, guiding and deciding on each treatment. Mr. Isaacson said Mr. Jobs made the final decision on each new treatment regimen.
The DNA sequencing that Mr. Jobs ultimately went through was done by a collaboration of teams at Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Harvard and the Broad Institute of MIT. The sequencing, Mr. Isaacson writes, allowed doctors to tailor drugs and target them to the defective molecular pathways.
A doctor told Mr. Jobs that the pioneering treatments of the kind he was undergoing would soon make most types of cancer a manageable chronic disease. Later, Mr. Jobs told Mr. Isaacson that he was either going to be one of the first “to outrun a cancer like this” or be among the last “to die from it.”
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
29 responses to “Steve Jobs Had His DNA Sequenced In Bid To Beat Cancer”
Steve after death still working. R.I.P
Steve was with us too short a time. His contribution to mankind has been enormous. I’m interested to see what comes out as a result of the DNA sequencing, even though I’m not a big supporter of the heavy pharmaceutical approach to modern medicine, except as a short-term emergency stopgap measure to get a patient out of danger.
Actually, a better understanding of genetics will help us get away from our over-reliance on drugs. In the future, we will be able to target treatments to the specific problem at hand, avoiding the current side effects. Already, it relatively easy, fast and cheep to sequence someone’s genome and our understanding of what the DNA code does, is increasing exponentially.
It’s important that we avoid falling for alternative medicine like Steve did for a while… after all, you know what they call alternative medicine that has been proved to work?
Medicine.
This is what will also come from Steve’s legacy…. His contribution to the study of his genes as compared to his cancer, and the tailoring of drugs…. This personalized therapy is probably something that contributed to his longevity.
He has probably secretly set up a foundation.
I wish this damn book would come out already. Sick of reading these spoilers from Mac blogs. But they are sooooo good!
so we can clone him?
Why did I bother to pre-order the book if it’s just going to be leaked bits at a time?
Stop spoiling the freaking book! Please.
He dies at the end.
At a cost of $100,000. I very much doubt that the average person is going to have access to such treatment. Unless you’re a wealthy CEO.
I think your figure is out date, a quick search found a company that would sequence an entire human genome for $5,000. The prices are rapidly falling. It won’t be long before it is about the same price as lazer eye surgery. I remember reading about a guy who brought the equipment to do it himself at home and diagnosed a genetic condition in his daughter.
Thats Harsh!
secondo me, tutte le persone VIP e o persone che guadagno cifre astronimiche devono essere perseguitati da gravi malattie, magari cosi si rendono conto di chi sta male e non si può curare con il proprio stipendio. Così poi dedicare i propri incassi devolvendoli alla comunità per la ricerca.
He’d probably be alive if he went to see Burzunski. Antineoplastons are the answer……smh all the money in the world, but big pharma still wins.