Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs (1955-2011) was diagnosed in October 2003 with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumour, a rarer and generally slower-growing disease than pancreatic adenocarcinoma and often curable by surgery when caught early. According to his authorised biographer, Walter Isaacson, he resisted an operation for around nine months, pursuing diet-based and alternative treatments, before undergoing a Whipple procedure in July 2004; Isaacson reported that Jobs later regretted the delay. He had a liver transplant in 2009 for metastatic disease, and had his tumour and germline genomes sequenced, an early instance of personal cancer genomics. He died on 5 October 2011 at 56. Clinicians cannot know whether earlier surgery would have changed his outcome, and his case is cited here not as a verdict but as the reason the conversation about delay, evidence and patient autonomy is had so often.