Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes & Sayings

In 2010, about six hundred thousand Americans, and more than 7 million humans around the world, will die of cancer. In the United States, one in three women and one in two men will develop cancer during their lifetime. A quarter of all American deaths, and about 15 percent of all deaths worldwide, will be attributed to cancer. In some nations, cancer will surpass heart disease to become the most common cause of death. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Ut because of the systematic neglect of cancer research: There are not over two dozen funds in the U.S. devoted to fundamental cancer research. They range in capital from about $500 up to about $2,000,000, but their aggregate capitalization is certainly not much more than $5,000,000 ... The public willingly spends a third of that sum in an afternoon to match a major football game. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

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

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

If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients. I — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I believe the biggest breakthroughs on cancer could come from brilliant researchers based in India. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

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

Hodgkin had just returned from his second visit to Paris, where he had learned to prepare and dissect cadaveric specimens. He was promptly recruited to collect specimens for Guy's new museum. The job's most inventive academic perk, perhaps, was his new title: the Curator of the Museum and the Inspector of the Dead. Hodgkin — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Life may be chemistry, but it's a special circumstance of chemistry. Organisms exist not because of reactions that are possible, but because of reactions that are barely possible. Too much reactivity and we would spontaneously combust. Too little, and we would turn cold and die. Proteins enable these barely possible reactions, allowing — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

Normal cells are identically normal; malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

In Eumenides, Apollo, chosen to represent Orestes in his murder trial, mounts a strikingly original argument: he reasons that Orestes's mother is no more than a stranger to him. A pregnant woman is just a glorified human incubator, Apollo argues, an intravenous bag dripping nutrients through the umbilical cord into her child. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

It is tempting to write the history of technology through products: the wheel; the microscope; the airplane; the Internet. But it is more illuminating to write the history of technology through transitions: linear motion to circular motion; visual space to subvisual space; motion on land to motion on air; physical connectivity to virtual connectivity. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The landscape of carcinogens is not static either. We are chemical apes: having discovered the capacity to extract, purify, and react molecules to produce new and wondrous molecules, we have begun to spin a new chemical universe around ourselves. Our bodies, our cells, our genes are thus being immersed and reimmersed in a changing flux of molecules
pesticides, pharmaceutical drugs, plastics, cosmetics, estrogens, food products, hormones, even novel forms of physical impulses, such as radiation and magnetism. Some of these, inevitably, will be carcinogenic. We cannot wish this world away; our task, then, is to sift through it vigilantly to discriminate bona fide carcinogens from innocent and useful bystanders. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Natures and features last until the grave — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Cancer is an expansionist disease; it invades through tissues, sets up colonies in hostile landscapes, seeking "sanctuary" in one organ and then immigrating to another. It lives desperately, inventively, fiercely, territorially, cannily, and defensively - at times, as if teaching us how to survive. To confront cancer is to encounter a parallel species, one perhaps more adapted to survival than even we are. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I think the way we think about cancer, the way we treat cancer, has dramatically changed in the last century. 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. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

I had a novice's hunger for history, but also a novice's inability to envision it. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Although cancer is not universally caused by viruses, certain viruses cause particular cancers, such as the human papilloma virus (HPV), which causes cervical cancer. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

In August 1867, a thirteen-year-old142 boy who had severely cut his arm while operating a machine at a fair in Glasgow was admitted to Lister's infirmary. The boy's wound was open and smeared with grime - a setup for gangrene. But rather than amputating the arm, Lister tried a salve of carbolic acid, hoping to keep the arm alive and uninfected. The wound teetered on the edge of a terrifying infection, threatening to become an abscess. But Lister persisted, intensifying his application of carbolic acid paste. For a few weeks, the whole effort seemed hopeless. But then, like a fire running to the end of a rope, the wound began to dry up. A month later, when the poultices were removed, the skin had completely healed underneath. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The (cancer) cells, technically speaking, are immortals. The woman from whose body they were once taken has been dead for thirty years — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Technological innovations do not define a science; they merely prove that medicine is scientific - i.e., — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The dinosaurs who studied dinosaurs would soon become extinct in their own right. Watson — Siddhartha Mukherjee

In the early 1950s, Fanny Rosenow, a breast cancer survivor and cancer advocate, called the New York Times to post an advertisement for a support group for women with breast cancer. Rosenow was put through, puzzlingly, to the society editor of the newspaper. When she asked about placing her announcement, a long pause followed. "I'm sorry, Ms. Rosenow, but the Times cannot publish the word breast or the word cancer in its pages. "Perhaps," the editor continued, "you could say there will be a meeting about diseases of the chest wall." Rosenow — Siddhartha Mukherjee

One swallow is a coincidence, but two swallows make summer. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Cancer is a flaw in our growth, but this flaw is deeply entrenched in ourselves. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

Technology, I said before, is most powerful when it enables transitions - between linear and circular motion (the wheel), or between real and virtual space (the Internet). Science, in contrast, is most powerful when it elucidates rules of organization - laws - that act as lenses through which to view and organize the world. Technologists — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

Leukemia was a malignant proliferation of white cells in the blood. It was cancer in a molten, liquid form. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

BRCA-1, a gene that strongly predisposes humans to breast and ovarian cancer. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

Specificity refers to the ability of any medicine to discriminate between its intended target and its host. Killing a cancer cell in a test tube is not a particularly difficult task: the chemical world is packed with malevolent poisons that, even in infinitesimal quantities, can dispatch a cancer cell within minutes. The trouble lies in finding a selective poison - a drug that will kill cancer without annihilating the patient. Systemic therapy without specificity is an indiscriminate bomb. For an anticancer poison to become a useful drug, Meyer knew, it needed to be a fantastically nimble knife: sharp enough to kill cancer yet selective enough to spare the patient. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

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

The discipline of medicine concerns the manipulation of knowledge under uncertainty. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

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

Turned into a horrific mistake. Lucy Willis had observed that folic acid, if administered to nutrient-deprived patients, could restore the normal genesis of blood. Farber wondered whether administering folic acid to children with leukemia might also restore normalcy to their blood. Following that tenuous trail, he obtained some synthetic folic acid, recruited a cohort of leukemic children, and started injecting folic acid into them. In the months that passed, Farber found that folic acid, far from stopping the progression of leukemia, actually accelerated it. In one patient, the white cell count nearly doubled. In another, the leukemia cells exploded into the bloodstream and sent fingerlings of malignant cells to infiltrate the skin. Farber stopped the experiment in a hurry. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Even an ancient monster needs a name. To name an illness is to describe a certain condition of suffering - a literary act before it becomes a medical one. A patient, long before he becomes the subject of medical scrutiny, is, at first, simply a storyteller, a narrator of suffering - a traveler who has visited the kingdom of the ill. To relieve an illness, one must begin, then, by unburdening its story. The — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born with a precocious scientific intellect and a thirst for chemical knowledge, Elion had completed a master's degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941 while teaching high school science during the day and preforming her research for her thesis at night and on the weekends. Although highly qualified, talented, and driven, she had been unable to find a job in an academic laboratory. Frustrated by repeated rejections, she had found a position as a supermarket product supervisor. When Hitchings found Trudy Elion, who would soon become on of the most innovative synthetic chemists of her generation (and a future Nobel laureate), she was working for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise. Rescued from a life of pickles and mayonnaise ... — Siddhartha Mukherjee

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled. - Italo Calvino — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

It was Disney World fused with Cancerland. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The moral and medical lessons from this story are even more relevant today. Medicine is in the midst of a vast reorganization of fundamental principles. Most of our models of illness are hybrid models; past knowledge is mishmashed with present knowledge. These hybrid models produce the illusion of a systematic understanding of a disease - but the understanding is, in fact, incomplete. Everything seems to work spectacularly, until one planet begins to move backward on the horizon. We have invented many rules to understand normalcy - but we still lack a deeper, more unified understanding of physiology and pathology. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Science is among the most profoundly human of our activities. Far from being subsumed by the dehumanising effects of technology, science, in fact, remains our last stand against it. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The very effect of X-rays killing rapidly dividing cells - DNA damage - also created cancer-causing mutations in genes. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

In science, ideology tends to corrupt; absolute ideology, [corrupts] absolutely. - Robert Nisbet — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

Seek simplicity, but distrust it," Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician and philosopher, once advised his students. Dobzhansky — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Bailey had profoundly changed the conversation around sexual identity away from the 1960s rhetoric of "choice" and "personal preference" toward biology, genetics, and inheritance. If we did not think of variations in height or the development of dyslexia or type 1 diabetes as choices, then we could not think of sexual identity as a choice. But — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

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

And this was to save rats, right? Or mice? You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors? — Siddhartha Mukherjee

In the folklore of science, there is the often-told story of the moment of discovery: the quickening of the pulse, the spectral luminosity of ordinary facts, the overheated, standstill second when observations crystallize and fall together into patterns, like pieces of a kaleidoscope. The apple drops from the tree. The man jumps up from a bathtub; the slippery equation balances itself.
But there is another moment of discovery - its antithesis - that is rarely recorded: the discovery of failure. It is a moment that a scientist often encounters alone. A patient's CT scan shows a relapsed lymphoma. A cell once killed by a drug begins to grow back. A child returns to the NCI with a headache. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

History repeats, but science reverberates. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Why did I write 'The Emperor of All Maladies?' A 56-year-old woman with an abdominal sarcoma, having undergone two remissions and a relapse, asked me to describe what she was battling. By the time I had finished answering her, I realised that I had written 600 pages. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

Postwar U.S. was the world's leader in science and technology. The investment in science research was staggering. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I think you would have to be a nihilist to say that we are not making progress on cancer, just like you'd have to be hubristically optimistic to say that we have conquered cancer. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Three profoundly destabilizing scientific ideas ricochet through the twentieth century, trisecting it into three unequal parts: the atom, the byte, the gene. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

in BRCA-1 has a 50 to 80 percent chance of developing breast cancer in her lifetime (the gene also increases the risk for ovarian cancer), about three to five times the normal risk. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing. - Voltaire — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Normalcy is the antithesis of evolution. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Memories sharpen the past; it is reality that decays. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Most of the selected essays share a common thread: They describe how science happens. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

This isolation was key to Farber's early success. Insulated from the spotlights of public scrutiny, he worked on a small, obscure piece of the puzzle. Leukemia was an orphan disease, abandoned by internists, who had no drugs to offer for it, and by surgeons, who could not possibly operate on blood. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

Like musicians, like mathematicians - like elite athletes - scientists peak early and dwindle fast. It isn't creativity that fades, but stamina: science is an endurance sport. To produce that single illuminating experiment, a thousand nonilluminating experiments have to be sent into the trash; it is battle between nature and nerve. Avery — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I am a scientist and I am a physician. So I write papers. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Cancer is not one disease but many diseases. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

Second, proto-oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes typically lie at the hubs of cellular signaling pathways. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

Our encounter with cancer has rounded us off; it has smoothed and polished us like river rocks. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

Cancer, then, is quite literally trying to emulate a regenerating organ - or perhaps, more disturbingly, the regenerating organism. Its quest for immortality mirrors our own quest, a quest buried in our embryos and in the renewal of our organs. Someday, if a cancer succeeds, it will produce a far more perfect being than its host - imbued with both immortality and the drive to proliferate. One might argue that the leukemia cells growing in my laboratory derived from the woman who died three decades earlier have already achieved this form of perfection. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

Great science emerges out of great contradiction. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

All cancers are alike but they are alike in a unique way. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

To understand cancer as a whole, he reasoned, you needed to start at the bottom of its complexity, in its basement. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

How can one capture genes that behave like ghosts," Weinberg wrote, "influencing cells from behind some dark curtain? — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

The universe seeks equilibriums; it prefers to disperse energy, disrupt organization, and maximize chaos. Life is designed to combat these forces. We slow down reactions, concentrate matter, and organize chemicals into compartments; we sort laundry on Wednesdays. "It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe," James Gleick wrote. We live in the loopholes of natural laws, seeking extensions, exceptions and excuses. The laws of nature still mark the outer boundaries of permissibility - but life, in all its idiosyncratic, mad weirdness, flourishes by reading between the lines. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

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

Science is often described as an iterative and cumulative process, a puzzle solved piece by piece, with each piece contributing a few hazy pixels of a much larger picture. But the arrival of a truly powerful new theory in science often feels far from iterative. Rather than explain one observation or phenomenon in a single, pixelated step, an entire field of observations suddenly seems to crystallize into a perfect whole. The effect is almost like watching a puzzle solve itself. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I wanted to explore cancer not just biologically, but metaphorically. The idea that tuberculosis in the 19th century possessed the same kind of frightening and decaying quality was very interesting to me, and it seemed that one could explore the idea that every age defined its own illness. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Genetic tests," as Eric Topol, the medical geneticist described it, "are also moral tests. When you decide to test for 'future risk,' you are also, inevitably, asking yourself, what kind of future am I willing to risk?" Three case studies illustrate the power and the peril of using genes to predict "future risk. — Siddhartha Mukherjee