Top 280 Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “History repeats, but science reverberates.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

2. “Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

3. “Medicine, I said, begins with storytelling. Patients tell stories to describe illness; doctors tell stories to understand it. Science tells its own story to explain diseases.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

4. “I am a scientist and I am a physician. So I write papers.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

5. “Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

6. “Ars longa, vita brevis.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

7. “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

8. “Activating or inactivating any single gene, he postulated, produced only the first steps toward carcinogenesis. Cancer’s march was long and slow and proceeded though many mutations in many genes over many iterations. In genetic terms, our cells were not sitting on the edge of the abyss of cancer. They were dragged toward that abyss in graded, discrete steps.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

9. “Is medicine a science?”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

10. “Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

11. “All cancers are alike but they are alike in a unique way.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

12. “A positive attitude does not cure cancer, any more than a negative one causes it.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

13. “It’s easy to make perfect decisions with perfect information. Medicine asks you to make perfect decisions with imperfect information.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

14. “Cancer thus exploits the fundamental logic of evolution unlike any other illness. 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

15. “There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

16. “Tumor angiogenesis exploits the same pathways that are used when blood vessels are created to heal wounds. Nothing is invented; nothing is extraneous. Cancer’s life is a recapitulation of the body’s life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. Susan Sontag warned against overburdening an illness with metaphors. But this is not a metaphor. Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

17. “I am not opposed to optimism, but I am fearful of the kind that comes from self-delusion.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

18. “When scientists underestimate complexity, they fall prey to the perils of unintended consequences.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

19. “Cancer, in short, was not merely genetic in its origin; it was genetic in its entirety. Abnormal genes governed all aspects of cancer’s behavior. Cascades of aberrant signals, originating in mutant genes, fanned out within the cancer cell, promoting survival, accelerating growth, enabling mobility, recruiting blood vessels, enhancing nourishment, drawing oxygen – sustaining cancer’s life.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

20. “The word palliate comes from the Latin palliare, “to cloak” – and providing pain relief was perceived as cloaking the essence of the illness, smothering symptoms rather than attacking disease.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

21. “Three profoundly destabilizing scientific ideas ricochet through the twentieth century, trisecting it into three unequal parts: the atom, the byte, the gene.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

22. “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

23. “A model is a lie that helps you see the truth.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

24. “Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

25. “Cancer, perhaps, is an ultimate perversion of genetics – a genome that becomes pathologically obsessed with replicating itself. The.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

26. “The revolution in cancer research can be summed up in a single sentence: cancer is, in essence, a genetic disease. – Bert Vogelstein.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

32. “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

33. “Organisms exist not because of reactions that are possible, but because of reactions that are barely possible.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

34. “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

35. “Cancer is a flaw in our growth, but this flaw is deeply entrenched in ourselves.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

36. “Normalcy is the antithesis of evolution.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

37. “To take care of cancer patients is an enormous privilege, but it also involves deploying everything in your toolbox: the emotional, the psychological, the scientific, the epidemiologic.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

38. “When you immerse yourself in medicine you realise that hope is not absolute. It’s not that simple.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

39. “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

40. “Could your medicine be a cell, not a pill? Could your medicine be an organ that’s created outside the body? Could your medicine be an environment?”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

41. “In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practice it much. – Sherlock Holmes, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

42. “Facebook users have higher levels of total narcissism, exhibitionism, and leadership than Facebook nonusers,” the study’s authors wrote. “In fact, it could be argued that Facebook specifically gratifies the narcissistic individual’s need to engage in self-promoting and superficial behavior.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

43. “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

44. “This strategy – which cost Min Chiu Li his job – resulted in the first chemotherapeutic cure of cancer in adults.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

45. “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

46. “I had never expected medicine to be such a lawless, uncertain world.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

47. “Seek simplicity, but distrust it,” Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician and philosopher, once advised his students. Dobzhansky.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

48. “It is not what you have,” as a certain Brazilian samba instructor once told me, “it is what you do with it.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

49. “There is no such thing as perfection, only the relentless, thirsty matching of an organism to its environment.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

50. “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