Oliver Sacks Has Terminal Cancer

Best-selling author and neurologist Oliver Sacks has been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. Sacks, 81, penned an eloquent op-ed in The New York Times on Thursday, expressing how he plans to spend the last months of his life: deepening friendships, saying goodbye, writing, and traveling. “I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude,” he wrote. “I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.” He concluded: “Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”