David Servan-Schreiber

In 1992 a volunteer failed to turn up for a brain-imaging experiment at Pittsburgh, so Servan-Schreiber climbed into the scanner himself, and the images showed a tumour in his own head. He was thirty-one. A French physician and neuroscientist, he was a clinical professor of psychiatry there and founded the medical centre's integrative medicine unit, and he had helped establish the American arm of Médecins Sans Frontières. Anticancer, which appeared in French in 2007 and in English the year after, sets his own diagnosis beside a case for diet, exercise and stress reduction as ways of making the body less hospitable to disease. It sold past a million copies in thirty-five languages. Oncologists and science writers argued that his claims ran well beyond the evidence, particularly on food and on mobile phones, and that a book with that reach owed readers more hedging. He told patients throughout to take conventional treatment. He died on 24 July 2011, aged fifty.