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

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?

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.

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

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

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'.

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.