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.

Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.

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

One swallow is a coincidence, but two swallows make summer.

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

In Paris, friend of Bequerel’s, a young physicist-chemist couple named Pierre and Marie Curie, began to scour the natural world for even more powerful chemical sources of X-rays. Pierre and Marie (then Maria Sklodowska, a penniless Polish immigrant living in a garret in Paris) had met at the Sorbonne and been drawn to each other because of a common interest in magnetism.

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