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

It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.

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'.

Most days, I go home and I feel rejuvenated. I feel ebullient.

I think the way we think about cancer, the way we treat cancer, has dramatically changed in the last century. There is an enormous amount of options that a physician can provide today, right down from curing patients, treating patients or providing patients with psychic solace or pain relief.

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.

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.