By keeping my hand in that, it's the way I keep learning. The main way you learn in medicine is by practicing and working with patients.

To be clear, I worry as much about the impact of the Internet as anyone else. I worry about shortening attention spans, the physical cost of sedentary 'surfing' and the potential for coarsening discourse as millions of web pages compete for attention by appealing to our base instincts.

Gardening is not trivial. If you believe that it is, closely examine why you feel that way. You may discover that this attitude has been forced upon you by mass media and the crass culture it creates and maintains. The fact is, gardening is just the opposite - it is, or should be, a central, basic expression of human life.

In the world at large, people are rewarded or punished in ways that are often utterly random. In the garden, cause and effect, labor and reward, are re-coupled. Gardening makes sense in a senseless world. By extension, then, the more gardens in the world, the more justice, the more sense is created.

Prolonged unemployment is a tragedy of broken lives, broken families, foreclosed homes, and life without health insurance.

We are trying to find drugs, small molecules, that people could take to make them disease-resistant, more youthful and healthy. Eventually we will find them.

Three women in my family, close relatives, have had breast cancer, and two have died from it, and still I never thought it could happen to me. I didn't even regularly check my breasts.

When I was younger, I used to pray that I would die before my mom. That's just how much my mom meant to me. I couldn't imagine being in this world without her. But then seeing cancer - seeing what it can do to somebody - as strong and as tough as she was, there was nothing she could do. Cancer is a dirty, dirty deal.