Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
ROUND ONE
Memento Mori
At fifty (in center), with Eve and Laurene (behind cake), Eddy Cue (by window), John Lasseter (with camera), and Lee 
Clow (with beard)
Cancer
Jobs would later speculate that his cancer was caused by the grueling year that he spent, starting in 
1997, running both Apple and Pixar. As he drove back and forth, he had developed kidney stones 
and other ailments, and he would come home so exhausted that he could barely speak. “That’s 
probably when this cancer started growing, because my immune system was pretty weak at that 
time,” he said.
There is no evidence that exhaustion or a weak immune system causes cancer. However, his 
kidney problems did indirectly lead to the detection of his cancer. In October 2003 he happened to 
run into the urologist who had treated him, and she asked him to get a CAT scan of his kidneys 
and ureter. It had been five years since his last scan. The new scan revealed nothing wrong with 
his kidneys, but it did show a shadow on his pancreas, so she asked him to schedule a pancreatic 
study. He didn’t. As usual, he was good at willfully ignoring inputs that he did not want to 
process. But she persisted. “Steve, this is really important,” she said a few days later. “You need to 
do this.”
Her tone of voice was urgent enough that he complied. He went in early one morning, and after 
studying the scan, the doctors met with him to deliver the bad news that it was a tumor. One of 
them even suggested that he should make sure his affairs were in order, a polite way of saying that 
he might have only months to live. That evening they performed a biopsy by sticking an 
endoscope down his throat and into his intestines so they could put a needle into his pancreas and 
get a few cells from the tumor. Powell remembers her husband’s doctors tearing up with joy. It 
turned out to be an islet cell or pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor, which is rare but slower growing 
and thus more likely to be treated successfully. He was lucky that it was detected so early—as the 
by-product of a routine kidney screening—and thus could be surgically removed before it had 
definitely spread.
One of his first calls was to Larry Brilliant, whom he first met at the ashram in India. “Do you 
still believe in God?” Jobs asked him. Brilliant said that he did, and they discussed the many paths 

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to God that had been taught by the Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba. Then Brilliant asked Jobs what 
was wrong. “I have cancer,” Jobs replied.
Art Levinson, who was on Apple’s board, was chairing the board meeting of his own company, 
Genentech, when his cell phone rang and Jobs’s name appeared on the screen. As soon as there 
was a break, Levinson called him back and heard the news of the tumor. He had a background in 
cancer biology, and his firm made cancer treatment drugs, so he became an advisor. So did Andy 
Grove of Intel, who had fought and beaten prostate cancer. Jobs called him that Sunday, and he 
drove right over to Jobs’s house and stayed for two hours.
To the horror of his friends and wife, Jobs decided not to have surgery to remove the tumor, 
which was the only accepted medical approach. “I really didn’t want them to open up my body, so 
I tried to see if a few other things would work,” he told me years later with a hint of regret. 
Specifically, he kept to a strict vegan diet, with large quantities of fresh carrot and fruit juices. To 
that regimen he added acupuncture, a variety of herbal remedies, and occasionally a few other 
treatments he found on the Internet or by consulting people around the country, including a 
psychic. For a while he was under the sway of a doctor who operated a natural healing clinic in 
southern California that stressed the use of organic herbs, juice fasts, frequent bowel cleansings, 
hydrotherapy, and the expression of all negative feelings.
“The big thing was that he really was not ready to open his body,” Powell recalled. “It’s hard to 
push someone to do that.” She did try, however. “The body exists to serve the spirit,” she argued. 
His friends repeatedly urged him to have surgery and chemotherapy. “Steve talked to me when he 
was trying to cure himself by eating horseshit and horseshit roots, and I told him he was crazy,” 
Grove recalled. Levinson said that he “pleaded every day” with Jobs and found it “enormously 
frustrating that I just couldn’t connect with him.” The fights almost ruined their friendship. “That’
s not how cancer works,” Levinson insisted when Jobs discussed his diet treatments. “You cannot 
solve this without surgery and blasting it with toxic chemicals.” Even the diet doctor Dean Ornish, 
a pioneer in alternative and nutritional methods of treating diseases, took a long walk with Jobs 
and insisted that sometimes traditional methods were the right option. “You really need surgery,” 
Ornish told him.
Jobs’s obstinacy lasted for nine months after his October 2003 diagnosis. Part of it was the 
product of the dark side of his reality distortion field. “I think Steve has such a strong desire for 
the world to be a certain way that he wills it to be that way,” Levinson speculated. “Sometimes it 
doesn’t work. Reality is unforgiving.” The flip side of his wondrous ability to focus was his 
fearsome willingness to filter out things he did not wish to deal with. This led to many of his great 
breakthroughs, but it could also backfire. “He has that ability to ignore stuff he doesn’t want to 
confront,” Powell explained. “It’s just the way he’s wired.” Whether it involved personal topics 
relating to his family and marriage, or professional issues relating to engineering or business 
challenges, or health and cancer issues, Jobs sometimes simply didn’t engage.
In the past he had been rewarded for what his wife called his “magical thinking”—his 
assumption that he could will things to be as he wanted. But cancer does not work that way. 
Powell enlisted everyone close to him, including his sister Mona Simpson, to try to bring him 
around. In July 2004 a CAT scan showed that the tumor had grown and possibly spread. It forced 
him to face reality.
Jobs underwent surgery on Saturday, July 31, 2004, at Stanford University Medical Center. He 
did not have a full “Whipple procedure,” which removes a large part of the stomach and intestine 
as well as the pancreas. The doctors considered it, but decided instead on a less radical approach, a 
modified Whipple that removed only part of the pancreas.
Jobs sent employees an email the next day, using his PowerBook hooked up to an AirPort 
Express in his hospital room, announcing his surgery. He assured them that the type of pancreatic 
cancer he had “represents about 1% of the total cases of pancreatic cancer diagnosed each year, 
and can be cured by surgical removal if diagnosed in time (mine was).” He said he would not 
require chemotherapy or radiation treatment, and he planned to return to work in September. 
“While I’m out, I’ve asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, so we 
shouldn’t miss a beat. I’m sure I’ll be calling some of you way too much in August, and I look 
forward to seeing you in September.”

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One side effect of the operation would become a problem for Jobs because of his obsessive 
diets and the weird routines of purging and fasting that he had practiced since he was a teenager. 
Because the pancreas provides the enzymes that allow the stomach to digest food and absorb 
nutrients, removing part of the organ makes it hard to get enough protein. Patients are advised to 
make sure that they eat frequent meals and maintain a nutritious diet, with a wide variety of meat 
and fish proteins as well as full-fat milk products. Jobs had never done this, and he never would.
He stayed in the hospital for two weeks and then struggled to regain his strength. “I remember 
coming back and sitting in that rocking chair,” he told me, pointing to one in his living room. “I 
didn’t have the energy to walk. It took me a week before I could walk around the block. I pushed 
myself to walk to the gardens a few blocks away, then further, and within six months I had my 
energy almost back.”
Unfortunately the cancer had spread. During the operation the doctors found three liver 
metastases. Had they operated nine months earlier, they might have caught it before it spread, 
though they would never know for sure. Jobs began chemotherapy treatments, which further 
complicated his eating challenges.