I believe the biggest breakthroughs on cancer could come from brilliant researchers based in India.

I think when we use 'stress', we are often using a kind of dummy word to try to fit many different things into one big category.

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 powerful chemical sources of X-rays. Pierre and Marie (then Maria Sklodowska, a penniless Polish immigrant living in a garret in Paris) had met at the Sorbonne and been drawn to each other because of a common interest in magnetism.

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 disease.

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 years, and I wanted to know what was its birth, what is its mind, its personality, its psyche?

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 illness with metaphors. But this is not a metaphor. Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.

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