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.

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

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.

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

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.

Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery.

This was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation.