Harald zur Hausen Quotes

Cancer is like a cockroach. It just comes back stronger. I'm tearing apart the immune system of the cockroach and seeing how it ticks. I've opened up my own pathology center.

Every cancer looks different. Every cancer has similarities to other cancers. And we're trying to milk those differences and similarities to do a better job of predicting how things are going to work out and making new drugs.

In America, we have always taken it as an article of faith that we 'battle' cancer; we attack it with knives, we poison it with chemotherapy or we blast it with radiation. If we are fortunate, we 'beat' the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having 'succumbed after a long battle.'

I believe the biggest breakthroughs on cancer could come from brilliant researchers based in India.

If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes.

In the 1960s and '70s, there wasn't much evidence at all. We knew vaguely the causes of cancer, but methods like genomics were very new.

I'm sure it really is hard to be an oncologist, and actually, more and more people are surviving cancer.

I had a ringside seat to cancer. As have most people.

I lost my aunt to breast cancer.

When I was at Stanford, I was actually in the cancer biology program, but I mostly focused on infectious disease.

In Sept of 2013 I was diagnosed as having an aggressive form of stage 2 endometrial cancer. I underwent a rigorous treatment program that included a radical hysterectomy followed with chemo and radiation therapy.

So even though I couldn't bear writing about cancer, I faced it every day.

Cancer is a word, not a sentence.

Cancer research is a growth industry.

Once you are diagnosed with cancer, time changes. It both speeds up insanely and stops altogether.

Incredibly, nearly 70,000 Young Adults between 15-39 are diagnosed with cancer each year. 10,000 will not survive. This is a very important stat for me, because I fall in this category. I am one of these statistics. Unlike every other age group, there has been no improvement in the 5-year survival of young adults in 30 years. That means many young adults have the same chance of getting cancer and dying from it as they did in the 1970's. This is not OK.

Although not yet routine, many cancer centers have the technology to sequence some or all of a patient's cancer genome. This can provide massive amounts of valuable information about your cancer, including whether you have genetic mutations and other abnormalities for which new drugs are available.

Until I was diagnosed with mouth cancer, I'd never heard of it.

Sidney Farber was a pathologist. He was called a doctor of the dead. He was a pathologist who sort of lived in the basement of the children's hospital in Boston, and he became very interested in childhood leukemia. And Farber began to inject this drug, aminopterin, into young kids, in order to see if he could get a remission.

Each of us knows a few or several young people whose lives have been devastated by cancer. I don't mean to be nihilistic about it, but it is very much an active killer of people now.

If you take 100 breast-cancer samples, 100 types of cancer have 100 different hallmarks of mutated genes. You could be nihilistic and say, 'Oh, God, we'll never be able to tackle this!' But there are deep, systematic, organizational principles at work in all that diversity.

Ever since my colorectal cancer in 1999, I have been followed by the N.I.H. That was very lucky for me because they detected my pancreatic cancer at a very early stage.

I don't feel that this is unfair. That's the thing about cancer. I'm not the only one; it happens all the time to people. I'm not special.

Well, I have been trained my entire life to recognize these outbreaks and recognize viruses. I have a Ph.D. in virology.

We want to keep creating the biggest impact we can in the cancer space by focuses on prevention, early detection, and psychosocial support.