I had seen cancer at a more cellular level as a researcher. The first time I entered the cancer ward, my first instinct was to withdraw from what was going on - the complexity, the death. It was a very bleak time.

Because I work on leukemia, the image of cancer I carry in my mind is that of blood. I imagine that doctors who work on breast cancer or pancreatic cancer have very different visualizations.

It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.

Robert Sandler is a child who died when he was three years old, and he is a child who was the first child that we know of to be treated with chemotherapy.

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.

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'.