“The (cancer) cells, technically speaking, are immortals. The woman from whose body they were once taken has been dead for thirty years”

“Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.”

“...lung cancer incidence in men increased dramatically in the 1950s as a result of an increase in cigarette smoking during the early twentieth century. In women, a cohort that began to smoke in the 1950s, lung cancer incidence has yet to reach its peak.”

“How can one capture genes that behave like ghosts," Weinberg wrote, "influencing cells from behind some dark curtain?”

“All cancers are alike but they are alike in a unique way.”

“Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos”

“But in 1960, oncology was not yet ready for this proposal. Not until several years later did it strike the board that had fired Li so hastily that the patients he had treated with the prolonged maintenance strategy would never relapse. This strategy--which cost Min Chiu Li his job--resulted in the first chemotherapeutic cure of cancer in adults.”