If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients.

Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.

I left Delhi in 1989 and remember very little of how life used to be then. Increasingly, in my recent visits to Delhi, I've started to realize that the city has become intellectually very lively. It makes me want to discover the city over and over again.

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.

Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients.

If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes.

When you immerse yourself in medicine you realise that hope is not absolute. It's not that simple.