cancer

I have had a busy year. Three surgeries, two of them major, one of them minor and a little procedure in-between. But that’s what has to happen when you get a cancer diagnosis. Bowel cancer to be specific. ‘Hang on a damn-blasted minute!’…

Y you should stop smoking A paper just published in Science found that smoking results in men losing their Y chromosome in blood cells. This study carried out in the USA compared the DNA of men who smoked and those who did not at the…

Cancer is clever. People speak about this extraordinarily diverse and complex group of diseases as if they were one disease and ask us impatiently when we are going to “cure” it. The reality is that many researchers, myself included,…

When I first studied cancer medicine as an undergraduate, my lecturer described chemotherapy as “beating up the patient with a baseball bat in the hope that you get the cancer on the way.” Chemotherapy has benefits, but the side effects can…

"Gas! Gas!….flound’ring like a man in fire or lime… guttering, choking, drowning… blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.” Few things evoke the horror of battle as powerfully as Wilfred Owens’ Dulce et Decorum Est. Even…