Jobs refused cancer treatment too long: biographer
Posted 2011/10/20 at 8:52 pm EDT
Oct. 20, 2011 (Reuters) ? Apple Inc co-founder Steve Jobs refused potentially life-saving cancer surgery for nine months, shrugging off his family's protests and opting instead for alternative medicine, according to the tech visionary's biographer.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs gestures during his unveiling of the iPhone 4 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, California, in this June 7, 2010 file photo. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith/Files
When he eventually sought surgery, the rare form of pancreatic cancer had spread to the tissues surrounding the organ, biographer Walter Isaacson said in an interview with "60 Minutes" on CBS, to be aired on Sunday.
Jobs also played down the seriousness of his condition and told everyone he was cured but kept receiving treatment in secret, Isaacson said in the interview.
The biography hits bookstores October 24 and emerged from scores of interviews with Jobs. It is expected to paint an unprecedented, no-holds-barred portrait of a man who famously guarded his privacy fiercely but whose death ignited a global outpouring of grief and tribute.
The book reveals Jobs was bullied in school, tried various quirky diets as a teenager, and exhibited early strange behavior such as staring at others without blinking, according to the Associated Press, which said it bought a copy on Thursday, without disclosing how.
In his "60 Minutes" interview, Isaacson confirmed details that had been speculated upon or widely reported, including that Jobs might have been cured of his "slow-growing" cancer had he sought professional treatment sooner, rather than resorting to unconventional means.
Jobs deeply regretted putting off a decision that might have ultimately saved his life, according to Isaacson.
"He tries to treat it with diet. He goes to spiritualists. He goes to various ways of doing it macrobiotically and he doesn't get an operation," Isaacson said in the interview.
"I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don't want something to exist, you can have magical thinking," he said. "We talked about this a lot."
Jobs announced in August 2004 that he had undergone surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his pancreas. In 2008 and 2009 -- as his dwindling weight stirred increasing alarm in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street -- he said first he was fighting a "common bug," then that he was suffering from a hormone imbalance. In 2009, news emerged that he had undergone a liver transplant.
FAVORITE BAND: BEATLES
Jobs died on October 5 at the age of 56. Outpourings of sympathy swept across the globe as state leaders, business rivals and fans paid their respects to the man who touched the daily lives of countless millions through the Macintosh computer, iPod, iPhone and iPad.
He had never revealed much about his life or thinking -- until he commissioned Isaacson for a biography he hoped would let his children know him better.
The book shed new light on how Jobs' relationship with longtime friend and ex-Apple board member, then-Google Inc CEO Eric Schmidt -- unraveled when the Internet search giant chose to go toe-to-toe with Apple in the smartphone arena.
According to AP's account of the biography, Jobs went on an expletive-laced rant against what he called "grand theft," after Google launched its Android mobile software on phones made by Taiwan's HTC Corp in 2010.
"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong," Jobs was cited as saying in the book, according to AP. "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."
Experts say Apple and Samsung Electronic's legal patent battle -- spanning at least three continents -- was really an attack on Google's 3-year-old software, now the world's most-used smartphone operating system.
Details also emerged about Jobs' life away from the world of business, which by all accounts had consumed most of his time.
Adopted as a baby by a family in Silicon Valley, Jobs met his biological father -- Abdulfattah "John" Jandali -- several times in the 1980s without realizing who he was, according to Isaacson.
Jandali had been running a restaurant in the area at the time. But Jobs never got in touch with Jandali once he found out the restaurateur was his biological father, according to an excerpt from the TV interview posted on CBS' website.
The technology icon also revealed he stopped going to church at age 13 after he saw starving children on the cover of Life Magazine, the AP cited the book as saying.
Jobs spent years studying Zen Buddhism and has famously traveled through India in search of spiritual guidance.
He talked in his biography about his love for design and called Apple's design chief Jonathan Ive his "spiritual partner"; Ive had "more operation power" at Apple than anyone besides Jobs himself, according to AP.
Jobs, who counted The Beatles among his favorites, came up with the name of his iconic company while on one of his "fruitarian diets." He had just returned from an apple farm and thought the moniker was "fun, spirited and not intimidating," AP cited the biography as saying.
Access the full link here:http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7385390n
(Reporting by Poornima Gupta and Edwin Chan; Editing by Richard Chang)
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