It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential ca….

I began wondering, can one really write a biography of an illness? But I found myself thinking of cancer as this character that has lived for 4,000 y….

History repeats, but science reverberates..

Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients..

Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos.

Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves..

Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching..

I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read..

I think the way we think about cancer, the way we treat cancer, has dramatically changed in the last century. There is an enormous amount of options ….

If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism o….

Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. Susan Sontag warned against overburdening an il….

All cancers are alike but they are alike in a unique way..

In Paris, friend of Bequerel’s, a young physicist-chemist couple named Pierre and Marie Curie, began to scour the natural world for even more powerfu….

It is hard to look at the tumor and not come away with the feeling that one has encountered a powerful monster in its infancy.

Cancer has enormous diversity and behaves differently: it's highly mutable, the evolutionary principles are very complicated and often its capacity t….

In 2005, a man diagnosed with multiple myeloma asked me if he would be alive to watch his daughter graduate from high school in a few months. In 2009….

There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression..

This was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation..

When you immerse yourself in medicine you realise that hope is not absolute. It's not that simple..

Probably the most important reason we are seeing more cancers than before is because the population is ageing overall. And cancer is an age-related d….

If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes..