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.

A breast cancer might turn out to have a close resemblance to a gastric cancer. And this kind of reorganization of cancer in terms of its internal genetic anatomy has really changed the way we treat and approach cancer in general.

I think the way we think about cancer, the way we treat cancer, has dramatically changed in the last century. There is an enormous amount of options that a physician can provide today, right down from curing patients, treating patients or providing patients with psychic solace or pain relief.

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

I had seen cancer at a more cellular level as a researcher. The first time I entered the cancer ward, my first instinct was to withdraw from what was going on - the complexity, the death. It was a very bleak time.

History repeats, but science reverberates.

Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos