Here is my first bit of advice: Never marry someone you can live with.

Only marry someone you cannot live without.

Fall — utterly and irreversibly — in love.

The kind of love that shatters your peace and rearranges your molecules.

My first love was platonic. Not a person but a question. As a teenager, I read about the immortal cancer cell: a cell born inside us that never dies. Even more mysterious: cancer cells defy rules. They migrate. And pancreatic cells show up in bones, ovarian cells invade the brain.

How could one cell gain both immortality and mobility? I was hooked.

Had I been educated in the West, I’d have pursued a PhD. But in Pakistan, medicine was my only entry point. That’s where I met my second love — the day I saw my first cancer patient. The sheer horror of it changed everything. I didn’t just want to study cancer. I wanted to ease suffering.

That’s what brought me to America — a woman, a Muslim, an immigrant, and one utterly bent on curing cancer.

And there, I met my third love, Harvey. But then cancer entered my own home, bringing my three loves into tragic collision when our daughter was only four. I became my husband’s oncologist and lost him. We are all tested. But not when we expect, and never how we imagine.

Video: Dr Azra Raza’s speech at Simon Fraser University, Canada, 12 June 2025.

If the yardstick to measure success were curing cancer, it must be said that my life hasn’t been a tidy success story. I began with great dreams of curing cancer but have so far failed. And yet, I gained something best described in these two Urdu couplets:

جستجو جس کی تھی اس کو تو نہ پایا ہم نے
اس بہانے سے مگر دیکھ لی دنیا ہم نے

I did not attain what I had set out to seek,
But in that pursuit, I swallowed the world

تجھ کو رسوا نہ کیا خود بھی پشیماں نہ ہوئے
عشق کی رسم کو اس طرح نبھایا ہم نے

I neither disgraced you, nor felt regret or shame in my devotion
Such is the decorum — the courtesy — demanded by true love

You protect the dignity of what you love, and in doing so, preserve your own. It is the journey that matters. The only Zen you find on top of the mountain is the Zen you brought with you.

A shout-out to Prof. Zareen Naqvi, Director of Institutional Research and Planning at Simon Fraser University. Urdu is the tenth most spoken language in the world. I hope SFU can add it as part of its world languages and literature program to serve a thriving diverse community in Vancouver.

Still here

The thing about the people you lose is — they never really go away.

Cancer came back into my little family of two once again. This time, through Andrew,my daughter Sheherzad’s best friend since high school. He wasn’t her boyfriend; our Andrew was gay. But her soulmate in every way.

At just 22, he was diagnosed with an inoperable Stage 4 glioblastoma multiforme,the deadliest brain tumor known to mankind.

From the moment of diagnosis, all his treating oncologists — including me — knew we could do absolutely nothing to prolong his survival. Yet, what followed? Surgery, the placement of shunts in his skull, chemotherapy, radiation, more surgery, more chemo, more radiation. Slash, poison, burn. Again and again.

He suffered terribly. The tumors kept growing.

We failed Andrew. How badly we failed this beautiful boy.

He died a tormented death at 23, exactly 16 months after diagnosis.

How many nights did Sheherzad call me, sobbing “Mommy, you’re supposed to help cancer patients. You are not helping Andrew.”

One week before his death, they brought Andrew the DNR form. Do Not Resuscitate. He waved them away saying, “I don’t want to die”.

That evening, after his mother left and his father came to stay the night, Andrew called the team back and signed it saying, “I couldn’t do it in front of my mother. She wouldn’t be able to take it.”

A dying son, still trying to protect his mother.

To me, this is heroism. And how privileged I am that I witness this on a daily basis in my clinic in a thousand nuanced ways. This is where our monuments should be. Not in marble or metal, but in reverence for this quiet courage, a silent nobility.

The dead — they don’t leave us. Not really.

Alaina, Andrew’s mother, called me. Her best friend had just been diagnosed with the same Stage 4 glioblastoma multiforme. She wanted to know if I have a better solution now.

I don’t. Cancer is still beating us.

Strategy for love

Our current strategy, of chasing after the last cancer cell, has not been successful for advanced cancers. To cure cancer, we must revolutionize early detection to find The First Cell.

The good news is our team of scientists and biomedical engineers at Columbia University has developed a stent, The Stentinel, that can continuously scan the bloodstream to find cancer’s first cells and the earliest biomarkers. And, the stent can be programmed to electrocute The First Cell.

This approach will democratize medicine worldwide, shifting the healthcare paradigm from one of treating illness to one of maintaining wellness. And if I don’t get there in my lifetime, then I ask you: carry the torch.

You, who are graduating today — I say to you that you have one and only one real responsibility in life: To reduce the suffering of humanity.

So yes — this is why I began with love. Because love is not a distraction. It is the very basis for all we do. Love for a person, love for an idea, love for justice, love for beauty, love for truth. It is the force that makes the unbearable bearable, the impossible worth attempting.

Whatever you choose to do in life — whether it’s curing disease, designing buildings, writing books, making films, creating companies — don’t settle for what you can live with. Choose what you cannot live without. Let that be your compass, your madness, your calling. The world doesn’t need more brilliant minds. It needs more burning hearts.

Go forth with yours on fire!

(The author is a physician, scientist and author, Chan Soon-Shiong Professor of Medicine, Clinical Director of the Evans Foundation MDS Center, Executive Director of The First Cell Coalition for Cancer Survivors at Columbia University in New York, and author of The First Cell, 2019. She was married to the late Harvey D. Preisler, Director, Rush University Cancer Center in Chicago. This article is excerpted from her speech Simon Fraser University’s graduating class of 2025. By special arrangement with Sapan)