Mukherjee Quotes & Sayings

I'm very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don't really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It's about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul. — Bharati Mukherjee

Propelled by freedom of faith, gender equality and economic justice for all, India will become a modern nation. Minor blemishes cannot cloak the fact that India is becoming such a modern nation: no faith is in danger in our country, and the continuing commitment to gender equality is one of the great narratives of our times. — Pranab Mukherjee

Children with cancer, as one surgeon noted, were typically "tucked in the farthest recesses of the hospital wards." They were on their deathbeds anyway, the pediatricians argued; wouldn't it be kinder and gentler, some insisted, to just "let them die in peace"? — Siddhartha Mukherjee

You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors? Exchanges — 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

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

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

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

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

In China, lung cancer is already a leading cause of death attributable to smoking in men. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

It's always good to get good reviews. I read my reviews. There are a lot of writers who don't read their reviews at all. I read them; then I put them away because it's not good to engage with them too much. — Neel 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

Its palliation is a daily task, its cure a fervent hope. - William Castle, describing leukemia in 1950 — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

I was born a Brahmin, but I'm not a Brahmin — Rudrangshu Mukherjee

I had never walked on the street alone when I was growing up in Calcutta, up to age 20. I had never handled money. You know, there was always a couple of bodyguards behind me, who took care if I wanted ... I needed pencils for school, I needed a notebook, they were the ones who were taking out the money. I was constantly guarded. — Bharati Mukherjee

I'm human, we all are - all doctors are - and grieving is a natural part of medicine. As a doctor, grieving is a natural part of medicine. If you deny that, again, you'd get into this trap of curing and victory. I think grief is very important. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

What we deplore is not that the gate of western knowledge was thrown open to Indians, but that such knowledge was imported to India at the sacrifice of our own cultural heritage. What was needed was a proper synthesis between the two systems and not neglect, far less destruction, of the Indian base. — Syama Prasad Mukherjee

It was, I suspected, not the first time that a patient had consoled a doctor about the ineffectuality of his discipline. — 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

Scientists divide. We discriminate. It is the inevitable occupational hazard of our profession that we must break the world into its constituent parts -- genes, atoms, bytes -- before making it whole again. We know of no other mechanism to understand the world: to create the sum of its parts, we must begin by dividing it into the parts of the sum. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The incident, played out for, it seemed, a few infinitely elastic seconds, caused a certain calculation to go through the boy's head. — Neel Mukherjee

You're eating like a sparrow nowadays. You've hardly touched your food.' 'You give me so much. There are so many dishes.' 'Where so many? One dal, one fry, one vegetable dish, a bit of fish, that's it.' 'And you don't think that's a lot?' 'You've eaten like this all your life,' she said, baffled. 'Don't you agree we eat too much?' 'Who, you and I?' she asked, still puzzled. 'No, no, by "we" I mean all of us, everyone in our social and economic class. — Neel Mukherjee

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

Science begins with counting. To understand a phenomenon, a scientist must first describe it; to describe it objectively, he must first measure it. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Remember that what seems zeitgeisty today is the cause of tomorrow's bafflement or, worse, ridicule. — Neel Mukherjee

As a bookish child in Calcutta, I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them outside the bounds of social decency. Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina lived large in my imagination. The naughty girls of Hollywood films flirted and knew how to drive. — Bharati Mukherjee

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

I can see the Milky Way. It's like the smudge of a cosmic giant's fingerprints on the inky black sky. And stars - so many millions and millions of them that, if I let my eyes unfocus for a bit, they too become a smear in the sky. — Neel 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

Life, like that water droplet, is everlasting and imperishable. There is only a transition, never an end ! — Rajib Mukherjee

The result, as the journalist Elizabeth Drew noted in the Atlantic Monthly, was "an unabashed act to protect private industry from government regulation." Politicians were far more protective of the narrow interests of tobacco than of the broad interest of public health. Tobacco makers need not have bothered inventing protective filters, Drew wrote drily: Congress had turned out to be "the best filter yet. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

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

Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

In any restaurant, my eyes alight first, as if by an atavistic pull, on the meat dishes on the menu. In any dinner party I throw, I think of the non-vegetarian dish as central. I view this as a combination of weakness, greed and moral failure. Someone please help. — Neel Mukherjee

Sandeep Jauhar's Doctored is a passionate and necessary book that asks difficult questions about the future of medicine. The narrative is gripping, and the writing is marvelous. But it was the gravity of the problem - so movingly told - that grabbed and kept my attention throughout this remarkable work. — 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

Battles are won one by one and enemy battalions are destroyed one at a time. Factories are built one at a time. Farmers cultivate one plot after another. We serve ourselves the total amount of food we can consume, but we eat it spoonful by spoonful; to eat it in one go would be impossible.This is known as the piecemeal solution. — Neel Mukherjee

The freedom fighters in India's long struggle for independence from British rule, or members of the African National Congress, were once classed as terrorists. History, as they say, is written by victors, but history also has many cunning corridors - how much time must elapse before all those tricky side-passages are revealed? — Neel Mukherjee

Events fall into a pattern that we can only discern retrospectively. We credit ourselves with far more agency than we actually possess. Things happen because they happen. — Neel Mukherjee

We are all equal children before our mother; and India asks each one of us, in whatsoever role we play in the complex drama of nation-building, to do our duty with integrity, commitment and unflinching loyalty to the values enshrined in our Constitution. — Pranab Mukherjee

Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship. (Mukherjee — Madhav Godbole

I personally believe that the office of the President of India is not to be sought. It is to be offered. — Pranab 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

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

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

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

A positive attitude does not cure cancer, any more than a negative one causes it. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

In the laboratory, we call this the six-degrees-of-separation-from-cancer rule: you can ask any biological question, no matter how seemingly distant - what makes the heart fail, or why worms age, or even how birds learn songs - and you will end up, in fewer than six genetic steps, connecting with a proto-oncogene or tumor suppressor. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The ones who do not believe, Dr.Mukherjee, think like me; just because we don't know about it, doesn't mean it didn't happen. — Sambhav Ratnakar

There will be no equity without solidarity. There will be no justice without a social movement. — Joia 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

Sidney Farber was a pathologist. He was called a doctor of the dead. He was a pathologist who sort of lived in the basement of the children's hospital in Boston, and he became very interested in childhood leukemia. And Farber began to inject this drug, aminopterin, into young kids, in order to see if he could get a remission. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

All my life's work will drain away without ever being realized. For a sculptor, working with their hands is crucial and hands must be supported by a strong and supple back. And I work with sturdy materials that need dexterity and strength to handle - metal and stone and sometimes even bricks! How do I do any of it now? — Radhika Mukherjee

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

I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class. — Bharati Mukherjee

In other words, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America. — Bharati Mukherjee

What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children? — Bharati Mukherjee

One writes what one can, or has to, write. — Neel Mukherjee

One time you mentioned the loneliness inside of marriage and I did not understand what you were saying. Two people are together; they have come from the same place; they share the same values, the same language. Practically speaking, they are the two halves of one consciousness. They eat the same food; they have a child; they sleep in the same bed, how can they be lonely. — Bharati Mukherjee

The novelist Thomas Wolfe, recalling a lifelong struggle with illness, wrote in his last letter, "I've made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I've seen the dark man very close." I had not made the journey myself, and I had only seen the darkness reflected in the eyes of others. But surely, it was the most sublime moment of my clinical life to have watched that voyage in reverse, to encounter men and women returning from the strange country - to see them so very close, clambering back. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

all this immorality and opportunism, this was what characterised them, not altruism, as the stories they had spun would have you believe. But then, this is a world whose running fuel is anecdotes and stories, he reminds himself. — Neel Mukherjee

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

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

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

People talk of rage as something fluid; it boils, flows, spills over, scalds. For her, it is not any of these things. Instead it is a vast, frozen sea, solid as rock, unthawable. She has never seen the sea, but she knows it wraps around three-quarters of the world. All her anger is that and more. — Neel Mukherjee

Whatever work you undertake, do it seriously, thoroughly and well; never leave it half-done or undone, never feel yourself satisfied unless and until you have given it your very best. Cultivate the habits of discipline and toleration. Surrender not the convictions you hold dear but learn to appreciate the points of view of your opponents. — Syama Prasad 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

Bill by bill, and letter by letter, his scientific imagination was slowly choked by administrative work. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The approach required more persistence than imagination, but it produced remarkable results. — 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

We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It's a question of time, not motive. — Bharati Mukherjee

In our generation, the role models were Gandhi and Nehru. We revered them. They were venerated personalities. I read almost every speech of Nehru. — Pranab Mukherjee

Cancer begins and ends with people. In the midst of scientific abstraction, it is sometimes possible to forget this one basic fact. ... — Siddhartha Mukherjee

It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance's link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety - one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The most intriguing correlations obtained by the Minnesota study were also among the most unexpected. Social and political attitudes between twins reared apart were just as concordant as those between twins reared together: liberals clustered with liberals, and orthodoxy was twinned with orthodoxy. Religiosity and faith were also strikingly concordant: twins were either both faithful or both nonreligious. Traditionalism, or "willingness to yield to authority," was significantly correlated. So were characteristics such as "assertiveness, drive for leadership, and a taste for attention." Other — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The word metastasis, used to describe the migration of cancer from one site to another, is a curious mix of meta and stasis - "beyond stillness" in Latin - an — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Love on the decline is hard to tell from love on the rise." [From 'The Lady from Lucknow'] — Bharati Mukherjee

Of course, running a coalition government in a country like India is a difficult task. More so when Congress leads the coalition, since most of the political parties were anti-Congress. To have a coalition, to run a coalition government, you require a lot of adjustments, a lot of flexibility. — Pranab Mukherjee

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

Don't behave in a funny manner. We must have Calcutta in India. — Pranab 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

In Hindu societies, especially overprotected patriarchal families like mine, daughters are not at all desirable. They are trouble. And a mother who, as mine did, has three daughters, no sons, is supposed to go and hang herself, kill herself, because it is such an unlucky kind of motherhood to have. — Bharati Mukherjee

If we didn't kill the tumor, we killed the patient. - William Moloney on the early days of chemotherapy — 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

Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just 'The Other.' — Bharati Mukherjee

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

To be an Indian writer is to write, necessarily and inevitably, about politics, so it was a given that the story of the Ghoshes, the family at the centre of 'The Lives of Others,' should have a political soul. — Neel Mukherjee

In the 1980s, we were advised, why don't you follow Reaganomics or Thatcherite economics. We said, yes, there are good points, let's see how we can fit them in the Indian economy. Every country has its own way of moving forward. — Pranab Mukherjee

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

Normalcy is the antithesis of evolution. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost. — Bharati Mukherjee

Political and social justice requires, not the disintegration of a country and destruction or humiliation of a class which shows initiative, intelligence and drive, but equality of opportunity for all, genuine freedom for self-fulfilment, in which all men irrespective of caste or creed may share. — Syama Prasad Mukherjee

Not every murderer is known, not every death is recorded, not every human being in the history of mankind is remembered and not every God's name is memorised by me. That doesn't mean they don't exist, Dr.Mukherjee. — Sambhav Ratnakar

Those who have not been trained in chemistry201 or medicine may not realize how difficult the problem of cancer treatment really is. It is almost - not quite, but almost - as hard as finding some agent that will dissolve away the left ear, say, and leave the right ear unharmed. So slight is the difference between the cancer cell and its normal ancestor. - William Woglom Life — Siddhartha Mukherjee

In Ruin City, in the rain, the sound of melancholy is a buzzing maelstrom of quiet desperation. The shatter has been so great, there is no sound left to despair. — Radhika Mukherjee

It was enough that I knew my soul sang, I didn't have to break into minstrelsy. — Neel Mukherjee