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

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
ROUND TWO
The Cancer Recurs
The Battles of 2008
By the beginning of 2008 it was clear to Jobs and his doctors that his cancer was spreading. When 
they had taken out his pancreatic tumors in 2004, he had the cancer genome partially sequenced. 
That helped his doctors determine which pathways were broken, and they were treating him with 
targeted therapies that they thought were most likely to work.
He was also being treated for pain, usually with morphine-based analgesics. One day in 
February 2008 when Powell’s close friend Kathryn Smith was staying with them in Palo Alto, she 
and Jobs took a walk. “He told me that when he feels really bad, he just concentrates on the pain, 
goes into the pain, and that seems to dissipate it,” she recalled. That wasn’t exactly true, however. 
When Jobs was in pain, he let everyone around him know it.
There was another health issue that became increasingly problematic, one that medical 
researchers didn’t focus on as rigorously as they did cancer or pain. He was having eating 
problems and losing weight. Partly this was because he had lost much of his pancreas, which 
produces the enzymes needed to digest protein and other nutrients. It was also because both the 
cancer and the morphine reduced his appetite. And then there was the psychological component, 
which the doctors barely knew how to address: Since his early teens, he had indulged his weird 
obsession with extremely restrictive diets and fasts.
Even after he married and had children, he retained his dubious eating habits. He would spend 
weeks eating the same thing—carrot salad with lemon, or just apples—and then suddenly spurn 
that food and declare that he had stopped eating it. He would go on fasts, just as he did as a 
teenager, and he became sanctimonious as he lectured others at the table on the virtues of 
whatever eating regimen he was following. Powell had been a vegan when they were first married, 
but after her husband’s operation she began to diversify their family meals with fish and other 
proteins. Their son, Reed, who had been a vegetarian, became a “hearty omnivore.” They knew it 
was important for his father to get diverse sources of protein.
The family hired a gentle and versatile cook, Bryar Brown, who once worked for Alice Waters 
at Chez Panisse. He came each afternoon and made a panoply of healthy offerings for dinner, 
which used the herbs and vegetables that Powell grew in their garden. When Jobs expressed any 
whim—carrot salad, pasta with basil, lemongrass soup—Brown would quietly and patiently find a 
way to make it. Jobs had always been an extremely opinionated eater, with a tendency to instantly 
judge any food as either fantastic or terrible. He could taste two avocados that most mortals would 
find indistinguishable, and declare that one was the best avocado ever grown and the other 
inedible.
Beginning in early 2008 Jobs’s eating disorders got worse. On some nights he would stare at 
the floor and ignore all of the dishes set out on the long kitchen table. When others were halfway 
through their meal, he would abruptly get up and leave, saying nothing. It was stressful for his 
family. They watched him lose forty pounds during the spring of 2008.
His health problems became public again in March 2008, when 
Fortune
published a piece 
called “The Trouble with Steve Jobs.” It revealed that he had tried to treat his cancer with diets for 
nine months and also investigated his involvement in the backdating of Apple stock options. As 
the story was being prepared, Jobs invited—summoned—
Fortune
’s managing editor Andy Serwer 
to Cupertino to pressure him to spike it. He leaned into Serwer’s face and asked, “So, you’ve 
uncovered the fact that I’m an asshole. Why is that news?” Jobs made the same rather self-aware 
argument when he called Serwer’s boss at Time Inc., John Huey, from a satellite phone he brought 

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to Hawaii’s Kona Village. He offered to convene a panel of fellow CEOs and be part of a 
discussion about what health issues are proper to disclose, but only if 
Fortune
killed its piece. The 
magazine didn’t.
When Jobs introduced the iPhone 3G in June 2008, he was so thin that it overshadowed the 
product announcement. In 
Esquire
Tom Junod described the “withered” figure onstage as being 
“gaunt as a pirate, dressed in what had heretofore been the vestments of his invulnerability.” 
Apple released a statement saying, untruthfully, that his weight loss was the result of “a common 
bug.” The following month, as questions persisted, the company released another statement saying 
that Jobs’s health was “a private matter.”
Joe Nocera of the