I Am A Scientist And I Am

In The Laboratory, We Call This The Six-degrees-of-separation-from-cancer Rule: You Can Ask Any Biological Question, No Matter How Seemingly Distant-what Makes The Heart Fail, Or Why Worms Age, Or Even How Birds Learn Songs-and You Will End Up, In Fewer Than Six Genetic Steps, Connecting With A Proto-oncogene Or Tumor Suppressor.

Cancer Was Not Disorganized Chromosomal Chaos. It Was Organized Chromosomal Chaos

If The History Of Medicine Is Told Through The Stories Of Doctors, It Is Because Their Contributions Stand In Place Of The More Substantive Heroism Of Their Patients.

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.

I Left Delhi In 1989 And Remember Very Little Of How Life Used To Be Then. Increasingly, In My Recent Visits To Delhi, I've Started To Realize That The City Has Become Intellectually Very Lively. It Makes Me Want To Discover The City Over And Over Again.