Anyone graduating from medical school in 1966 had first to fulfill military service before launching a career. Fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War, I sought to avoid it through an assignment to the Public Health Service.

I had learned that science is a rewarding, active process of discovery, not the passive absorption of what others had discovered.

Every cancer looks different. Every cancer has similarities to other cancers. And were trying to milk those differences and similarities to do a better job of predicting how things are going to work out and making new drugs.

I keep encouraging the pharmaceutical companies to put more money into R&D.

Science can improve lives in ways that are elegant in design and moving in practice.

A cancer is not simply a lung cancer. It doesn't simply have a certain kind of appearance under the microscope or a certain behavior, but it also has a set of changes in the genes or in the molecules that modify gene behavior that allows us to categorize cancers in ways that is very useful in thinking about new ways to control cancer by prevention and treatment.

There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century : the atom, the computer, and the gene.