Top 280 Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “If we didn’t kill the tumor, we killed the patient. – William Moloney on the early days of chemotherapy.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

53. “In 1847, he changed the name to the more academic-sounding “leukemia” – from leukos, the Greek word for “white.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

55. “It is the impulse of science to try to understand nature, and the impulse of technology to try to manipulate it.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

56. “The discipline of medicine concerns the manipulation of knowledge under uncertainty.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

57. “And it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained. – Hegel.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

58. “It took the full force of human genetics to bring sanity to the study of madness.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

59. “As early as 1935, Hitler had privately mused about ramping up his gene-cleansing efforts from sterilization to euthanasia – what quicker way to purify the gene pool than to exterminate the defectives? –.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

60. “Like the master score of a bewitchingly complex symphonic work, the genome contains the instructions for the development and maintenance of organisms. But the genomic “score” is inert without proteins. Proteins actualize this information. They conduct the genome, thereby playing out its music-activating the viola at the fourteenth minute, a crash of cymbals during the arpeggio, a roll of drums at the crescendo.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

61. “One swallow is a coincidence, but two swallows make summer.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

62. “Freaks become norms, and norms become extinct. Monster by monster, evolution advanced.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

63. “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

64. “Modesty is a virtue,” he would later write, “yet one gets further without it.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

65. “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

66. “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

67. “Its palliation is a daily task, its cure a fervent hope. – William Castle, describing leukemia in 1950.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

68. “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

69. “Show me that you can divide the notes of a song; But first, show me that you can discern Between what can be divided And what cannot. – An anonymous musical composition inspired by a classical Sanskrit poem.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

70. “Memories sharpen the past; it is reality that decays.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

71. “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

72. “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.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

73. “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

74. “The smiling oncologist does not know whether his patients vomit or not.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

75. “We must learn to count the living with that same particular attention with which we number the dead. – Audre Lorde.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “The poet Jason Shinder wrote, “Cancer is a tremendous opportunity to have your face pressed right up against the glass of your mortality.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

80. “Every drug, the sixteenth-century physician Paracelsus once opined, is a poison in disguise. Cancer chemotherapy, consumed by its fiery obsession to obliterate the cancer cell, found its roots in the obverse logic: every poison might be a drug in disguise.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell. – Karl Popper.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

85. “How small a thought it takes to fill someone’s whole life,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

86. “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

87. “Cancer, Auerbach argued, was a disease unfolded slowly in time. It did not run, but rather slouched to its birth. Auerbach.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

88. “Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

89. “As early as the sixth century BC, ayurvedic practitioners in India had recognized the general symptoms of anemia – the.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

90. “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 us to live on the edges of chemical entropy-skating perilously, but never falling in.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

91. “A patient, long before he becomes the subject of medical scrutiny, is, at first, simply a storyteller, a narrator of suffering –.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

92. “Etymologically, patient means sufferer. It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. – Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor.”

— 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. “I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

95. “Second, proto-oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes typically lie at the hubs of cellular signaling pathways.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

96. “If you know the question, you know half.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

97. “When you decide to test for ‘future risk,’ you are also, inevitably, asking yourself, what kind of future am I willing to risk?”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

98. “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

99. “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

100. “Nineteenth-century doctors often linked cancer to civilization: cancer, they imagined, was caused by the rush and whirl of modern life, which somehow incited pathological growth in the body. The link was correct, but the causality was not: civilization did not cause cancer, but by extending human life spans – civilization unveiled it.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee