A positive attitude does not cure cancer, any more than a negative one causes it.

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.

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

I am a scientist and I am a physician. So I write papers.

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.

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.

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