I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read.

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

It is hard to look at the tumor and not come away with the feeling that one has encountered a powerful monster in its infancy

In 2005, a man diagnosed with multiple myeloma asked me if he would be alive to watch his daughter graduate from high school in a few months. In 2009, bound to a wheelchair, he watched his daughter graduate from college. The wheelchair had nothing to do with his cancer. The man had fallen down while coaching his youngest son's baseball team.

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.

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.

I believe the biggest breakthroughs on cancer could come from brilliant researchers based in India.