Top 100 Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes
#1. The revolution in cancer research can be summed up in a single sentence: cancer is, in essence, a genetic disease. - Bert Vogelstein
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#2. Freaks become norms, and norms become extinct. Monster by monster, evolution advanced
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#3. 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
#5. Seek simplicity, but distrust it," Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician and philosopher, once advised his students. Dobzhansky
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#7. 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
#8. My memory of my household is of one immersed in books and music. I have a very intimate relationship with Bengali literature, particularly Tagore, and my interest besides reading then was music.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#10. Cancer is a tremendous opportunity to have your face pressed right up against the glass of your mortality. But what patients see through the glass is not a world outside cancer, but a world taken over by it - cancer reflected endlessly around them like a hall of mirrors.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle. - Sun Tzu
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#14. 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
#15. This book is the story of the birth, growth, and future of one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science:
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#16. Three profoundly destabilizing scientific ideas ricochet through the twentieth century, trisecting it into three unequal parts: the atom, the byte, the gene.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#18. 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
#19. A patient, long before he becomes the subject of medical scrutiny, is, at first, simply a storyteller, a narrator of suffering -
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#20. 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
#21. The very effect of X-rays killing rapidly dividing cells - DNA damage - also created cancer-causing mutations in genes.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#22. And this was to save rats, right? Or mice? You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors?
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#23. 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
#25. A positive attitude does not cure cancer, any more than a negative one causes it.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#27. I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#28. In science, ideology tends to corrupt; absolute ideology, [corrupts] absolutely. - Robert Nisbet
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#30. 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
#32. The art of medicine is long, Hippocrates tells us, and life is short; opportunity fleeting; the experiment perilous; judgment flawed.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#33. The trial designed to bring the most rigorous statistical analysis to the cause of lung cancer barely required elementary mathematics to prove its point.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#34. 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
#35. Never a cell biologist at heart, as a colleague recalled, he contaminated the cells, infected the cultures, and grew out balls of fungi in the petri dishes.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#36. We don't know why, but pancreatic cancer has a very interesting physiological link to depression. There seems to be a deep link, and we don't know what it is.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#37. 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
#38. Cancer, we now know, is a disease caused by the uncontrolled growth of a single cell.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#39. Is there something I can do to kill the cancer germ? Can the rooms be fumigated ... ? Should I give up my lease and move out?
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#41. 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
#42. 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
#44. In a spiritual sense, a positive attitude may help you get through chemotherapy and surgery and radiation and what have you. But a positive mental attitude does not cure cancer - any more than a negative mental attitude causes cancer.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#45. Robert Sandler is a child who died when he was three years old, and he is a child who was the first child that we know of to be treated with chemotherapy.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#46. 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. Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#48. Postwar U.S. was the world's leader in science and technology. The investment in science research was staggering.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#49. Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Leukemia is cancer of the white blood cells - cancer in one of its most explosive, violent incarnations. As one nurse on the wards often liked to remind her patients, with this disease even a paper cut is an emergency.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#53. Cancer, perhaps, is an ultimate perversion of genetics - a genome that becomes pathologically obsessed with replicating itself. The
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#54. Cancer changes your life," a patient wrote after her mastectomy. "It alters your habits. ... Everything becomes magnified.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#55. 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
#56. 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
#58. BRCA-1, a gene that strongly predisposes humans to breast and ovarian cancer.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#59. There is a duality in recognising what an incredible disease it is - in terms of its origin, that it emerges out of a normal cell. It's a reminder of what a wonderful thing a normal cell is. In a very cold, scientific sense, I think a cancer cell is a kind of biological marvel.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#60. An Irish surgeon, Denis Burkitt, discovered an aggressive form of lymphoma - now called Burkitt's lymphoma -
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#61. What we do in the laboratory is we try to design drugs that will not just eradicate cancer cells but will eradicate their homes.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#62. Cancer is not a concentration camp, but it shares the quality of annihilation: it negates the possibility of life outside and beyond itself; it subsumes all living.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#63. I left Delhi in 1989 and remember very little of how life used to be then. Increasingly, in my recent visits to Delhi, I've started to realize that the city has become intellectually very lively. It makes me want to discover the city over and over again.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#64. 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
#65. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. The gene that enables birds to learn songs can become cancer-causing. There is no normal physiological process that can't be bastardized by the disease.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#70. In 2004, a rash of early scientific reports suggested that cell phones, which produce radio frequency energy, might cause a fatal form of brain cancer called a glioma.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#71. Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#72. The dinosaurs who studied dinosaurs would soon become extinct in their own right. Watson
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#73. The approach required more persistence than imagination, but it produced remarkable results.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#74. Second, proto-oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes typically lie at the hubs of cellular signaling pathways.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#75. 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
#76. Most of the selected essays share a common thread: They describe how science happens.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#77. This was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#78. A Pap smear would give a woman a chance to receive preventive care [and] greatly decrease the likelihood of her ever developing cancer.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#79. 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
#80. I had seen cancer at a more cellular level as a researcher. The first time I entered the cancer ward, my first instinct was to withdraw from what was going on - the complexity, the death. It was a very bleak time.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#81. Low fiber, red meat rich diets increase the risks of colon cancer, and obesity is linked to breast cancer, but much more about these links remain unknown, especially in molecular terms.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#82. We know cancer is caused ultimately via a link between the environment and genes. There are genes inside cells that tell cells to grow and the same genes tell cells to stop growing. When you deregulate these genes, you unleash cancer. Now, what disrupts these genes? Mutations.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#83. 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
#84. In China, lung cancer is already a leading cause of death attributable to smoking in men.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#85. The discipline of medicine concerns the manipulation of knowledge under uncertainty.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#86. Each of us knows a few or several young people whose lives have been devastated by cancer. I don't mean to be nihilistic about it, but it is very much an active killer of people now.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. It is not what you have," as a certain Brazilian samba instructor once told me, "it is what you do with it.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#95. Normal cells are identically normal; malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#96. Bill by bill, and letter by letter, his scientific imagination was slowly choked by administrative work.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#97. Cancer is not just a dividing cell. It's a complex disease: It invades, it metastasizes, it evades the immune system.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#98. Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, 'You know, that doesn't look right'.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#99. The search for a way to eradicate this scourge ... is left to incidental dabbling and uncoordinated research. - The Washington Post, 1946
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#100. 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
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