Here’s the date and time for the next Café Scientifique Vancouver (Canada) talk, from the group’s  June 18, 2013 announcement,

Our next café will happen on Tuesday June 25th, 7:30pm at The Railway Club. Our speaker for the evening will be Claudia Cornwall, a science writer and author of 5 books and over 50 magazine articles. The details of her talk are as follows:Catching Cancer—the story of a medical revolution

We now know that 20% of cancers are caused by infections and many researchers believe that more discoveries are coming. This is a paradigm shift that was over a hundred years in the making. It has profound implications for our ability to prevent malignancies. Claudia Cornwall’s new book, Catching Cancer: the quest for its viral and bacterial cause, is the story of the story of how it happened. Who contributed to the change in thinking? [emphasis mine] How did investigators persuade the medical establishment to adopt their ideas? What personal qualities helped them in their struggle? To answer these questions, the book draws on wide-ranging interviews with Nobel prize winners and other researchers.

This looks like it’s going to be a very interesting (i.e., lively) session as it is a topic freighted with stress, fear, and mythology than cancer. I don’t think I’ve ever met another adult who didn’t have a friend or a family member who had and recovered or died from the disease. I expect this will be a very well attended talk.

For those who don’t know the location,

  The Railway Club is on the 2nd floor of 579 Dunsmuir St. (at Seymour St.), in Vancouver, Canada.

I have long been interested in how ideas become knowledge and had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Rainer Becker about his project (sadly, it was cancelled) on what seems to have bene a topic very similar to Cornwall’s book. From the first part of the Becker interview in my June 1, 2010 posting,

First, some information about the research project and Dr. Becker from the April 22, 2010 news item on Nanowerk,

How do sensational ideas become commonly accepted knowledge? How does a hypothesis turn into certainty? What are the ways and words that bring results of scientific experiments into textbooks and people’s minds, how are they “transferred” into these domains? Science philosopher Dr. Rainer Becker has recently started dealing with such questions. Over the next three years, Becker will accompany the work of Professor Dr. Frank Rösl’s department at the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ), which studies cancer-causing viruses. [emphasis mine] He is one of three scientists in an interdisciplinary joint project which is funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with a total sum of approximately € 790,000.

Part 2 of the interview is here in my June 2, 2010 posting.

Getting back to the Cornwall’s appearance at the Tuesday, June 25, 2013 Café Scientifique Vancouver event, I imagine she will have her book available for sale there. From Cornwall’s Catching Cancer webpage,

Catching Cancer is published by Rowman and Littlefield.  It is available in bookstores and on in line in Canada, the U.S. and many other countries.

978-1-4422-1520-7 • Hardback
April 2013 • $36.00 • (£22.95)

978-1-4422-1522-1 • eBook
March 2013 • $35.99 • (£22.95)

Pages: 240 Size: 6 x 9

Here’s more about the book, from the Catching Cancer webpage,

Catching Cancer: the quest for its viral and bacterial causes introduces readers to the investigators who created a medical revolution – a new way of looking at cancer and its causes. Featuring interviews with notable scientists such as Harald zur Hausen, Barry Marshall, Robin Warren, and others, the book tells the story of their struggles, their frustrations, and finally the breakthroughs that helped form some of the most profound changes in the way we view cancer. I take readers inside the lab to reveal the long and winding path to discoveries that have changed and continue to alter the course of medical approaches to one of the most confounding diseases mankind has known. I tell the stories of families who have benefited from this new knowledge, of the researchers who made the revolution happen, and the breakthroughs that continue to change our lives.

For years, we’ve thought cancer was the result of lifestyle choices, environmental factors, or genetic mutations. But pioneering scientists have begun to change that picture. We now know that infections cause 20 percent of cancers, including liver, stomach, and cervical cancer, which together kill almost 1.8 million people every year. While the idea that you can catch cancer may sound unsettling, it is actually good news. It means antibiotics and vaccines can be used to combat this most dreaded disease. With this understanding, we have new methods of preventing cancer, and perhaps we may be able to look forward to a day when we will no more fear cancer than we do polio or rubella.

You can find out more Cornwall and her books  on the Claudia Cornwall website.