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Ars longa, vita brevis. The art of medicine is long, Hippocrates tells us, “and life is short; opportunity fleeting; the experiment perilous; judgment flawed.”
It could write genetic information backward: it was a retrovirus.
The first, the “biological challenge” of cancer, involves “harnessing the fantastic rise in scientific knowledge . . . to conquer this ancient and terrible illness.” But the second, the “social challenge,” is just as acute: it involves forcing ourselves to confront our customs, rituals, and behaviors. These, unfortunately, are not customs or behaviors that lie at the peripheries of our society or selves, but ones that lie at their definitional cores: what we eat and drink, what we produce and exude into our environments, when we choose to reproduce, and how we age.
Normal cells are identically normal; malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways.
When truly radical discoveries appear, their impact is often not incremental but cataclysmic and paradigm-shifting.
Technology dissolves its own past.
