On an evening in August, 2008, Cindy Valent learned that her twenty-year-old son, Curt, was in the hospital. Valent, who was fifty-three, with frosted hair and a matter-of-fact manner, lived in Cecil, a small town in southwestern Pennsylvania, which has become a hub of the natural-gas industry. For nearly a year, Curt, a junior at Robert Morris University, had been complaining that his shoulder hurt. That weekend, while with his girlfriend, Erin, he began running a fever and having chest pains. “I thought it was no big deal,” Valent told me recently. In the evening, routine imaging at the hospital revealed a spot near his lung. A few weeks later, Curt was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a virulent form of bone cancer, which had spread to his lungs, liver, lymph nodes, and spleen.