Top 100 Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes
#1. Gliomas appeared on the same side of the brain that the phone was predominantly held, further tightening the link. An avalanche of panic ensued in the media.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#2. If we, as a species, are the ultimate product of Darwinian selection, then so, too, is this incredible disease that lurks inside us.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#3. Second, proto-oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes typically lie at the hubs of cellular signaling pathways.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#4. The approach required more persistence than imagination, but it produced remarkable results.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#5. The dinosaurs who studied dinosaurs would soon become extinct in their own right. Watson
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#6. Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#7. Pierre and Marie (then Maria Sklodowska, a penniless Polish immigrant living in a garret in Paris) had met at the Sorbonne and been drawn to each other because of a common interest in magnetism.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#8. It is one thing to try to understand how genes influence human identity or sexuality or temperament. It is quite another thing to imagine altering identity or sexuality or behavior by altering genes.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#9. We may have to learn to live with cancer rather than die of it. It means a big change in our mindset and how we do research. We haven't quite reached there yet.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#10. It was a Rube Goldberg disease. A change in the sequence of a gene caused the change in the sequence of a protein; that warped its shape; that shrank a cell; that clogged a vein; that jammed the flow; that racked the body (that genes built).
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#11. BRCA-1, a gene that strongly predisposes humans to breast and ovarian cancer.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#12. In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice that the world keeps shifting so quickly under her feet that she has to keep running just to keep her position. This is our predicament with cancer: we are forced to keep running merely to keep still.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#13. It turns out that the very genes that turn on in cancer cells perform vital functions in normal cells. In other words, the very genes that allow our embryos to grow or our brains to grow, our bodies to grow, if you mutate them, if you distort them, then you unleash cancer.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#14. Cancer, perhaps, is an ultimate perversion of genetics - a genome that becomes pathologically obsessed with replicating itself. The
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#15. In the late 1940s, Saunders had tended to a Jewish refugee from Warsaw dying of cancer in London. The man had left Saunders his life savings - £500 - with a desire to be "a window in [her] home."577
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#16. Our ability to read out this sequence of our own genome has the makings of a philosophical paradox. Can an intelligent being comprehend the instructions to make itself? - John Sulston Scholars
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#17. Cancer is not just a dividing cell. It's a complex disease: It invades, it metastasizes, it evades the immune system.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#18. Bill by bill, and letter by letter, his scientific imagination was slowly choked by administrative work.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#19. It is not what you have," as a certain Brazilian samba instructor once told me, "it is what you do with it.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#20. It is hard to look at the tumor and not come away with the feeling that one has encountered a powerful monster in its infancy
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#21. It is an old complaint about the practice of medicine that it inures you to the idea of death. But when medicine inures you to the idea of life, to survival, then it has failed utterly.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#22. The trick to my writing, it turned out, was doing so exclusively in bed. The minute I even dared to discipline myself and write at the desk, I produced mounds of nonsense. Yet, sitting in bed, I wrote easily, effortlessly, fluidly. I became the master of perfect indiscipline.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#23. Indeed, cancer's emergence in the world is the product of a double negative: it becomes common only when all other killers themselves have been killed.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#24. The chances in some cases are infinitesimal, but the potential is still there. This is about all that patients need to know and it is about all that patients want to know.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#25. One day, I had a patient who was going through chemotherapy who came to me and said, 'I'm going to go on with what I'm doing, but I need you to tell me what it is that I'm fighting.'
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#26. Unlike other diseases, the vulnerability to cancer lies in ourselves. We always thought of disease as exogenous, but research into cancer has turned that idea on its head - as long as we live, grow, age, there will be cancer.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#27. A positive attitude does not cure cancer, any more than a negative one causes it.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#28. Every generation of cancer cells creates a small number of cells that is genetically different from its parents. When a chemotherapeutic drug or the immune system attacks cancer, mutant clones that can resist the attack grow out.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#29. And this was to save rats, right? Or mice? You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors?
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#30. Lung cancer incidence in men increased dramatically in the 1950s as a result of an increase in cigarette smoking during the early twentieth century. In women, a cohort that began to smoke in the 1950s, lung cancer incidence has yet to reach its peak.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#31. Some cancers are curable, while others are highly incurable. The spectrum is enormous. Metastatic pancreatic cancer is a highly incurable disease, whereas some leukemia forms are very curable. There is a big difference between one form and another.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#33. By now the perpetually changing landscape of breast cancer was beginning to tire him out. Trials, tables, and charts had never been his forte; he was a surgeon, not a bookkeeper.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#34. Doctors treat diseases, but they also treat people, and this precondition of their professional existence sometimes pulls them in two directions at once.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#36. There was no detectable association between gliomas and cell phone use overall. Prevention experts, and phone-addicted teenagers, may have rejoiced - but only briefly.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#38. Seek simplicity, but distrust it," Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician and philosopher, once advised his students. Dobzhansky
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#40. If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#41. Freaks become norms, and norms become extinct. Monster by monster, evolution advanced
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#42. The cure of even one solid cancer in adults, Farber knew, would singularly revolutionize oncology. It would provide the most concrete proof that this was a winnable war.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#43. Min Chiu Li, the researcher who had been expelled from the institute for treating women with placental tumors with methotrexate long after their tumors had visibly disappeared.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#44. Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#45. A breast cancer might turn out to have a close resemblance to a gastric cancer. And this kind of reorganization of cancer in terms of its internal genetic anatomy has really changed the way we treat and approach cancer in general.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#47. What if - poring through Graham's bank in some future era - the selected "genius specimens" were found to possess the very genes that, in alternative situations, might be identified as disease enabling (or vice versa: What if "disease-causing" gene variants were also genius enabling?)?
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#48. Because I work on leukemia, the image of cancer I carry in my mind is that of blood. I imagine that doctors who work on breast cancer or pancreatic cancer have very different visualizations.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#50. The God of Worms had evidently left tiny loopholes of chance in the worm's design, but He still wouldn't throw dice.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#51. Halsted called this procedure the "radical mastectomy," using the word radical in the original Latin sense to mean "root"; he was uprooting cancer from its very source.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#52. The idea that cancer genes are sitting inside each and every one of our chromosomes, just waiting to be corrupted or inactivated and thereby unleashing cancer, is, of course, one of the seminal ideas of oncology.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#54. I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#55. Yet the personal choice to smoke is ... the same kind of choice as the driver who downed the beers, and then the telephone pole. - Open letter from the tobacco industry, 1988
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#56. Its palliation is a daily task, its cure a fervent hope. - William Castle, describing leukemia in 1950
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#57. In God we trust," he brusquely told a journalist. "All others [must] have data.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#58. In an age of increasingly mechanized production, the genesis of scientific knowledge remains an unyieldingly, obstreperously hand-hewn process. It is among the most human of our activities. Far from being subsumed by the dehumanizing effects of technology, science remains our last stand against it.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#59. I don't know why I deserved the illness in the first place, but then I don't know why I deserved to be cured. Leukemia is like that. It mystifies you. It changes your life.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#60. In New York in the 1910s, William B. Coley, James Ewing, and Ernest Codman had treated bone sarcomas with a mixture of bacterial toxins - the so-called Coley's toxin.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#62. I could write a thesis on the physiology of vision. But I had no way to look through the fabric of confabulation spun by a man with severe lung disease who was prescribed 'home oxygen', but gave a false address out of embarrassment because he had no 'home.'
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#63. Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#64. Cancer begins and ends with people. In the midst of scientific abstraction, it is sometimes possible to forget this one basic fact. ...
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#65. Unidentified flying objects, abominable snowmen, the Loch Ness monster and human cancer viruses. - Medical World News, 1974, on four "mysteries" widely reported and publicized but never seen
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#66. The point is this: if you cannot separate the phenotype of mental illness from creative impulses, then you cannot separate the genotype of mental illness and creative impulse.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#67. Prostate cancer represents a full third of all cancer incidence in men - sixfold that of leukemia and lymphoma.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#68. It's easy to make perfect decisions with perfect information. Medicine asks you to make perfect decisions with imperfect information.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#69. It is the impulse of science to try to understand nature, and the impulse of technology to try to manipulate it.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#70. What does it mean to be an oncologist? It means that you get to sit in at a moment of another person's life that is so hyper-acute, and not just because they're medically ill. It's also a moment of hope and expectation and concern.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#71. How can one capture genes that behave like ghosts," Weinberg wrote, "influencing cells from behind some dark curtain?
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#72. The (cancer) cells, technically speaking, are immortals. The woman from whose body they were once taken has been dead for thirty years
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#73. A strong intuition is much more powerful than a weal test. Normals teach us rules; outliers teach us laws. For every perfect medical experiment, there is a perfect human bias.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#74. It felt - nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos - that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#76. Whether epidemiology alone can, in strict logic, ever prove causality, even in this modern sense, may be questioned, but the same must also be said of laboratory experiments on animals. - Richard Doll
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#77. Probably the most important reason we are seeing more cancers than before is because the population is ageing overall. And cancer is an age-related disease.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#78. Technological innovations do not define a science; they merely prove that medicine is scientific - i.e.,
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#79. There is an enormous amount of options that a physician can provide today, right down from curing patients, treating patients, or providing patients with psychic solace or pain relief. So, in fact, the gamut of medical intervention is enormous.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#81. Every era casts illness in its own image. Society, like the ultimate psychosomatic patient, matches its medical afflictions to its psychological crises; when a disease touches such a visceral chord, it is often because that chord is already resonating.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#82. Many of my patients continued to smoke, often furtively, during their treatment for cancer (I could smell the acrid whiff of tobacco on their clothes as they signed the consent forms for chemotherapy).
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#83. A cancer cell is an astonishing perversion of the normal cell. Cancer is a phenomenally successful invader and colonizer in part because it exploits the very features that make us successful as a species or as an organism.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#84. I began wondering, can one really write a biography of an illness? But I found myself thinking of cancer as this character that has lived for 4,000 years, and I wanted to know what was its birth, what is its mind, its personality, its psyche?
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#85. Cancer is a flaw in our growth, but this flaw is deeply entrenched in ourselves.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#86. Mary Lasker was an entrepreneur; she was a socialite. She was kind of a legendary networker. She became interested in saying, 'Well, you know, if these diseases don't have political support we'll never conquer them.' And she made, really, cancer her special cause.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#87. Cancer has enormous diversity and behaves differently: it's highly mutable, the evolutionary principles are very complicated and often its capacity to be constantly mystifying comes as a big challenge.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#88. There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#89. In 1788, the Chimney Sweepers Act was passed in Parliament, preventing master sweeps from employing children under eight (children over eight were allowed to be apprenticed).
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#90. We of the craft are all crazy," Lord Byron, the high priest of crazies, wrote. "Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#91. There's a phrase in Shakespeare: he refers to it as the 'hidden imposthume', and this idea of a hidden swelling is seminal to cancer. But even in more contemporary writing it's called 'the big C'.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#92. Leukemia was a malignant proliferation of white cells in the blood. It was cancer in a molten, liquid form.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#93. The clinician, no matter how venerable, must accept the fact that experience, voluminous as it might be, cannot be employed as a sensitive indicator of scientific validity,
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#95. Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#96. Over a man's life, his semen grew into a mobile library of every part of the body - a condensed distillate of the self. This
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#97. I had never expected medicine to be such a lawless, uncertain world. I wondered if the compulsive naming of parts, diseases, and chemical reactions - frenulum, otitis, glycolysis - was a mechanism invented by doctors to defend themselves against a largely unknowable sphere of knowledge.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#98. Intelligence...[is] not marathon rac[e]: there is no fixed criteria for success, no start or finish lines -- and running sideways or backwards, might secure victory.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#99. Two presentations, among all, stood out in their particularly chilling fervor. The first was an enthusiastic and precise exhibit by the Germans endorsing "race hygiene" - a grim premonition of times to come. Alfred
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#100. There's a rising cancer trend and, as I said, one of the major contributors is the overall ageing of the population - we aren't dying of other things, so we're dying of cancer.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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