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.

It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance's link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety - one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars.

Cancer has enormous diversity and behaves differently: it's highly mutable, the evolutionary principles are very complicated and often its capacity to be constantly mystifying comes as a big challenge.

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.

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

In the laboratory, we call this the six-degrees-of-separation-from-cancer rule: you can ask any biological question, no matter how seemingly distant-what makes the heart fail, or why worms age, or even how birds learn songs-and you will end up, in fewer than six genetic steps, connecting with a proto-oncogene or tumor suppressor.