One in Three: A Son's Journey into the History and Science of Cancer
by Adam Wishart
311pp, Profile, £15

For WH Auden, cancer was "like some hidden assassin / Waiting to strike at you". When you first hear that you've got the Big C it "hits you like a blockbuster", a leukaemia sufferer tells Adam Wishart. "It's a death sentence." For Wishart's 72-year-old father, the first sign that something was wrong was an acute pain in his neck. His doctor prescribed a few painkillers. In fact a tumour had caused two of his vertebrae to crumble like eggshells: "His neck was so fragile that had he tripped then, he would have died." The metastasis, or secondary tumour, in his neck was caused by undiagnosed prostate cancer silently spreading its rogue cells, like seeds of death, through his bloodstream. His father died a year later.

Wishart seamlessly weaves together the personal, the historical and the scientific threads of his narrative to tell the story of cancer from the perspective of his father's illness. The result is both moving and informative, a book that tries to answer the questions Wishart's father asked when he was first diagnosed: what is cancer and why haven't we managed to cure it yet? Wishart writes lucidly about the biology of the disease: "Cancer's terrible genius is that it can turn the body's natural power to the purpose of destruction." Cancer spreads uncontrollably throughout the body because it exploits the "wonder of life", the mechanism by which cells divide and life begins; this paradox is one reason why it is so difficult to cure. Out of the 100 million million cell divisions that occur over a human lifetime, just one malignant cell can prove fatal in the long term: "With every duplication, its dangerous characteristics are passed on to its offspring and a simple aberration becomes a cluster, then a lump, then a tumour."

One in Three - the proportion of people who will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives - explores the history of cancer treatment from brutal, pre-anaesthetic surgery, to the many miracle cures hailed by medics and media alike: radium (the "Aladdin's lamp to medical science", as one paper called it), chemotherapy (described by patients as "like fire seeping through their flesh"), interferon, and today's wonder drugs that try to repair the genetic aberrations that are the root cause of the disease. Wishart's title is inspired by a chapter on the environmental causes of cancer in Rachel Carson's 1962 eco-classic Silent Spring. Her chapter was titled "One in four". But unlike Carson (who was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer in the month that she completed the chapter), Wishart doesn't blame pollution for the increasing incidence of the disease. Cancer is the price of progress: "Paradoxically, because we suffer less from other diseases and we live richer lives, we are more likely to develop cancer." High-calorie diets, sunbathing, delayed childbearing, having fewer children and smoking all increase the risk. But the prognosis is far from gloomy, Wishart says. There has been a 10% reduction in deaths from cancer in the past decade. According to specialist Karol Sikora, by 2025 cancer will be a "chronic disease" like heart disease or asthma, but not necessarily a terminal condition: "It is time to understand that cancer is becoming a disease to live with rather than only die from."

But whatever the future holds, Wishart's own family soon had to face the reality that for their father there would be no cure: "Medicine's sophisticated models of human biology were worthless when faced with dying Dad." His poignant account of his father's illness serves as a powerful reminder of the individual tragedies behind the history and the science. He captures beautifully those final moments of closeness between father and son when there are "no more illusions, no more sprinklings of hope"; moments that are so full of emotion, yet so hard to put into words. Julia Darling offers some sound advice (quoted by Wishart) in her poem "How to Behave with the Ill". We shouldn't cry "or get emotional", rather "Remember that this day might be your last / and that it is a miracle that any of us / stands up, breathes, behaves at all."

· PD Smith is writing a cultural history of science and superweapons for Penguin