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.

I had seen cancer at a more cellular level as a researcher. The first time I entered the cancer ward, my first instinct was to withdraw from what was going on - the complexity, the death. It was a very bleak time.

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

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

Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for.

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?