I Had Seen Cancer At A More

Writing Anything As An Expert Is Really Poisonous To The Writing Process, Because You Lose The Quality Of Discovery.

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.

In Paris, Friend Of Bequerel’s, A Young Physicist-chemist Couple Named Pierre And Marie Curie, Began To Scour The Natural World For Even More Powerful Chemical Sources Of X-rays. Pierre And Marie (then Maria Sklodowska, A Penniless Polish Immigrant Living In A Garret In Paris) Had Met At The Sorbonne And Been Drawn To Each Other Because Of A Common Interest In Magnetism.

Good Physicians Are Rarely Dispassionate. They Agonize And Self-doubt Over Patients.

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.