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?

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

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'.

Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, 'You know, that doesn't look right'.

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.

It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.

I wanted to explore cancer not just biologically, but metaphorically. The idea that tuberculosis in the 19th century possessed the same kind of frightening and decaying quality was very interesting to me, and it seemed that one could explore the idea that every age defined its own illness.