Sandeep Jauhar’s Doctored is a passionate and necessary book that asks difficult questions about the future of medicine. The narrative is gripping, and the writing is marvelous. But it was the gravity of the problem—so movingly told—that grabbed and kept my attention throughout this remarkable work.

When you immerse yourself in medicine you realise that hope is not absolute. It's not that simple.

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.

If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients.

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.

All cancers are alike but they are alike in a unique way.