Several executives at large corporations tried to persuade Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs to have surgery when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004, but none of them convinced him, according to the new biography by Walter Isaacson to be published Monday.

Jobs postponed the crucial surgery and tried other exotic treatments linked to fruit juices, acupuncture, and herbal remedies, among others.

Among the executives was Andrew Grove, former head of Intel Corporation who had overcome prostate cancer. According to the New York Times, Grove told Jobs that diets and acupuncture were not a cure for his cancer.

"I told him he was crazy," Grove said.

Another executive who tried was Art Levinson, chairman of Genentech and a member of the Apple board. The Times reports that Levinson was frustrated that he could not persuade Jobs to have surgery.

His biographer Walter Isaacson said Jobs resisted having surgery because he didn't want his body to be "opened."

"The big thing was that he really was not ready to open his body,” said Jobs' wife Laurene Powell said in the book, according to the Times. “It’s hard to push someone to do that,” she said, although she tried.

That decision not only infuriated his physicians but his family and friends as well, according to the New York Times, citing the book to be published Monday.

Nine months after being diagnosed, Jobs had surgery and then he did it "with passion and curiosity sparing no expense, pushing frontiers of new treatments," the Times reports.

The report says that Jobs underwent pioneering treatments for his rare type of cancer that soon would make most types of cancer a manageable chronic disease, according to one of his doctors.

However, the report doesn't specify the type of treatments he underwent.

Yet, Jobs' biographer unveiled that Jobs became one of 20 people in the entire world to have all the genes of his cancer tumor and his normal DNA sequenced which allowed doctors to customize drugs and target them at a molecular level, according to the Times.

That sequencing cost around $100,000, the report says.

Jobs believed either he would be among the first to "outrun a cancer like this" or among the last to "die from it," reports the newspaper.

Jobs died at age 56 on October 5 after his battle with cancer.