Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. Susan Sontag warned against overburdening an illness with metaphors. But this is not a metaphor. Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.

Postwar U.S. was the world's leader in science and technology. The investment in science research was staggering.

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

I left Delhi in 1989 and remember very little of how life used to be then. Increasingly, in my recent visits to Delhi, I've started to realize that the city has become intellectually very lively. It makes me want to discover the city over and over again.

There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression.

I began wondering, can one really write a biography of an illness? But I found myself thinking of cancer as this character that has lived for 4,000 years, and I wanted to know what was its birth, what is its mind, its personality, its psyche?

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.