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If you just do a Google search and type in 'smoking' or 'lung cancer', you will be barraged with never ending facts and numbers, like how one in every three Americans is affected by lung disease and how COPD is the third leading cause of death and if you get lung cancer the odds are 95% that you will die.

People are used to dealing with risk. You are told if you smoke, you are at higher risk of lung cancer. And I think people are able to also understand, when they are told they are a carrier for a genetic disease, that is not a risk to them personally but something that they could pass on to children.

You don't have free will when you have lung cancer.

Cancer affects all of us, whether you're a daughter, mother, sister, friend, coworker, doctor, patient.

What I quickly learned after my diagnosis is that the world of a cancer patient has many parts and a good deal of uncertainty.

Cancer affects so many people, and even if it hasn't affected someone in your family then you know someone who has had it.

Every single cancer is a genetic disease. Not necessarily inherited from your parents, but it's genetic changes which cause cancer. So as we sequence the genomes of tumours and compare those to the sequence of patients, we're getting down to the fundamental basis of each individual person's cancer.

So many of us have friends or family who have battled cancer, and we know how important it is to find a cure.