A furious researcher stumbled out of one of the lab buildings and shouted, 'I'm a scientist working on the AIDS cure. Why are you here? You are making too much noise.' It was a statement that epitomized the vast and growing rift between scientists and patients.

Only one person was conspicuously missing from the (American Society of Clinical Oncology, ASCO) party - Dennis Slamon. Having spent the afternoon planning the next phase of Herceptin trials with breast oncologists at ASCO, Slamon had jumped into his rundown Nissan and driven home.

Nothing is invented; nothing is extraneous. Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own [. . .] this is not a metaphor. Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.

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

In God we trust. All others [must] have data. - Bernard Fisher

It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.

In the turbulent century between 1850 and 1950, the world offered conflict, atomisation and disorientation. The cigarette offered its equal and opposite salve: camaraderie, a sense of belonging, and the familiarity of habits. If cancer is the quintessential product of modernity, then so, too, is its principal preventible cause: tobacco.

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.