The biggest risk factor for cancer is aging.

Precision medicine is diving into the DNA with a knowledge that everybody's tumor has a unique genetic profile and you want to be able to identify that specific piece of DNA that has become mutated and that is driving cancer growth.

I think there's a lack of understanding which is partly our fault as scientists and physicians in not communicating well enough with the public. But there's a lack of understanding of how important biomedical research is.

I like to think of making cancer a chronic disease rather than focus just on curing cancer.

The decrease in incidents of death from cancer is largely attributable to new medicines or therapeutics. Perhaps a third is attributable to changing our environment, and that includes of course smoking which I believe accounted for probably 20 percent of deaths from, certainly from lung cancer, more than that from lung cancer, but from cancer overall.

The four most common cancers that account for about 80 percent of all cancer deaths are lung, breast, colorectal cancer, and prostate cancer.

Hepatitis C was a devastating disease but because fundamental research was done in hepatitis C, it is now curable. It is now absolutely curable with new medications. So this is transformative.