Probably The Most Important Reason We Are

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.

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'.

I Began Wondering, Can One Really Write A Biography Of An Illness? But I Found Myself Thinking Of Cancer As This Character That Has Lived For 4,000 Years, And I Wanted To Know What Was Its Birth, What Is Its Mind, Its Personality, Its Psyche?

I Am A Scientist And I Am A Physician. So I Write Papers.

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.