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.

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

A breast cancer might turn out to have a close resemblance to a gastric cancer. And this kind of reorganization of cancer in terms of its internal genetic anatomy has really changed the way we treat and approach cancer in general.

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.

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