I think that the marriage of academic medical centers and academicians with the private sector is a very, is a marriage made in heaven because it's the best way to get basic discoveries from the laboratory into new therapeutics for our patients.

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 key to HIV/AIDS was to say let's give a patient multiple different therapies at the same time and that makes the virus much less likely to mutate.

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.

Precision medicine is one way to attack cancer and it's proven to be very effective but, remember that like HIV/AIDS, you're going to need combination therapies.

The biggest risk factor for cancer is aging.

Once you close down your laboratory, you can't just rev it up again if you're able to finally get a grant.