" Well, in our country ," said Alice, still panting a little, " you'd generally get to somewhere else--if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing ." " A slow sort of country! " said the Queen. " Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that! " -Lewis Carrol, Through the Looking-Glass One of the chapters of Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of all Maladies begins with this very apt quote that describes the pursuit of hundreds of clinicians and researchers worldwide to know more about and overpower this deadly disease that we call cancer. Do we know of a time before cancer came to existence? Probably not. If we do not have proofs of its existence since the beginning of life, it is only because no records are available or we may not have come across (or understood) them. What we do know is that this monster