La ciencia encarna el deseo humano de entender la naturaleza; la tecnología conjuga ese deseo con la ambición de controlarla.

Emblematic of this era was the prolific Viennese surgeon Theodor Billroth. Born in 1821, Billroth studied music and surgery with almost equal verve. (The professions still often go hand in hand. Both push manual skill to its limit; both mature with practice and age; both depend on immediacy, precision, and opposable thumbs.)

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

Death (or at least the social meaning of death) could be counted and recounted with other gauges, often resulting in vastly different conclusions. The appraisal of diseases depends, Breslow argued, on our self-appraisal. Society and illness often encounter each other in parallel mirrors, each holding up a Rorschach test for the other.

The measurement of illness, Breslow was arguing, is an inherently subjective activity: it inevitably ends up being a measure of ourselves. Objective decisions come to rest on normative ones.

Doctors were allergic to the smell of death. Death meant failure, defeat--their death, the death of medicine, the death of oncology.

It was easy to repossess imagination with false promises; much harder to do so with nuanced truths. It demanded an act of exquisite measuring and remeasuring, filling and unfilling a psychological respirator with oxygen. Too much "repossession" and imagination might bloat into delusion. Too little and it might asphyxiate hope altogether.

Think about the vast range of medicines and surgical procedures not as therapeutic interventions but as investigational probes.

Instead of trying to tailor the disease to fit his medicine, Kaplan learned to tailor his medicine to fit the right disease. This simple principle--the meticulous matching of a particular therapy to a particular form and stage of cancer--would eventually be given its due merit in cancer therapy.