Cancer metastases like empires

Many months ago, I attended an unexpected lecture that shifted my perspective on disease, power, and the body. The speaker wasn't an oncologist or molecular biologist, but a quietly spoken English literature professor. What she said in that room made me stop taking notes and truly listen.

"Cancer cells metastasise like empires," she said. The room went silent.

She wasn't being poetic; she was precise. Cancer cells invade spaces that were never theirs. They rewrite the body's rules, much like colonisers rewrite a country's laws. They don't negotiate or coexist. They take, transform, and multiply until the host body becomes unrecognisable.

I had spent years studying nanoformulations, drug delivery systems, and oncogenic pathways, always viewing tumours as enemies to be targeted and eradicated. But I had never heard disease described this way, not as a mere malfunction, but as an act of conquest; not something that happens to a body, but something that colonises it.

The professor's observation had an unexpected effect. It personalised the abstract. It politicised the cellular. It made me realise, sitting in that hall, that the metaphors we use aren't neutral. They carry histories. They carry power.

What struck me wasn't just the insight, but the boldness of the connection. A professor trained in stories and language recognised what medical training had concealed, a pattern of invasion, appropriation, and erasure that persists across centuries and organs. The logic of empires operates in both. The same ruthlessness. The same indifference to what existed before.

I reflected on patients, clinics, researchers, and how we inherit frameworks from elsewhere, rarely questioning whose metaphors they are, what they enable, or what they conceal.

That moment was an intellectual clash that sticks with you. It wasn't an answer. It was a question disguised as a connection:

What happens when we allow ourselves to see the patterns that don’t fit neatly into our disciplines? What might we learn when a literature professor teaches us more about the logic of disease than a decade of molecular biology?

Sometimes, the deepest insights come from the margins, from someone brave enough to draw the line between a coloniser’s ship and a spreading cell, urging us to see, in the body’s rebellion against itself, the ghost of every empire that ever tried to remake the world in its image.