Most Discoveries Even Today Are A Combination

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.

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.

Cancer Has Enormous Diversity And Behaves Differently: It's Highly Mutable, The Evolutionary Principles Are Very Complicated And Often Its Capacity To Be Constantly Mystifying Comes As A Big Challenge.

I Think The Cardinal Rule Of Learning To Write Is Learning To Read First. I Learned To Write By Learning To Read.

It Felt—nearly Twenty-five Hundred Years After Hippocrates Had Naively Coined The Overarching Term Karkinos—that Modern Oncology Was Hardly Any More Sophisticated In Its Taxonomy Of Cancer.