Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, 'You know, that doesn't look right'.

One swallow is a coincidence, but two swallows make summer.

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.

Could your medicine be a cell, not a pill? Could your medicine be an organ that's created outside the body? Could your medicine be an environment?

I wanted to explore cancer not just biologically, but metaphorically. The idea that tuberculosis in the 19th century possessed the same kind of frightening and decaying quality was very interesting to me, and it seemed that one could explore the idea that every age defined its own illness.

There's a phrase in Shakespeare: he refers to it as the 'hidden imposthume', and this idea of a hidden swelling is seminal to cancer. But even in more contemporary writing it's called 'the big C'.

It felt—nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos—that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer.