In a maneuver as transparently glib as that of calling his book a biography, Dr. Mukherjee also inserts occasional glimpses of his own patients, whose experiences are markedly overdramatized. (“It was now 9:30 in the morning. The city below us had stirred fully awake. The door shut behind me as I left, and a whoosh of air blew me outward and sealed Carla in.”) But none of this personal material is as compelling as the story of how cancer research has progressed through so many different phases.

Here Dr. Mukherjee’s writing is at its most candid and grim. The overarching point made by his narrative is that the whole subject of cancer is dauntingly complex. Even the statistics about mortality rates are tricky, since so much of researchers’ thinking about the prevalence of cancer depends on how they measure progress. And the unmistakable effect of our progress in curing other previously fatal diseases is to make cancer, which is most often found in older patients, look more prevalent than ever.

“The Emperor of All Maladies” is at its most honest in describing the push-pull dynamics of scientific progress. Dr. Mukherjee links a decline in extremely punishing chemotherapy regimens to the fact that patients became less passive. (He credits much of this forcefulness to AIDS activists.) He describes the conflicting interests of surgeons and chemotherapists. He writes most promisingly about the effects of genome mapping on scientists’ ability to understand how cancers progress, and he cites the similar ways in which different cancers create genetic pathways within mutating cells. He is confounding yet fair in writing that “this is either very good news or very bad news.”

Late in “The Emperor of All Maladies” Dr. Mukherjee provides especially apt metaphors for a subject so difficult to grasp. He quotes the Red Queen from Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” to describe the alacrity with which research must move: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” He describes one patient’s maneuvers to keep up with her illness as “like watching someone locked in a chess game.” And he says that the patterns in cancer research repeat themselves just as history does. Among the constants in this struggle are “the hypnotic drive for universal solutions” and “the queasy pivoting between defeatism and hope.”