When I think of cancer prevention, I think of cancer vaccines, but I think more broadly of all that we can do to prevent cancer. And part of that is coming up with a vaccine that will work like the vaccines we have for hepatitis B or flu or polio.

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.

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.

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.

Cancer can no longer be classified according to the organ in which it arises. It has to be characterized in terms of the genetic mutation that exists.