Top 280 Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Cancer’s life is a recapitulation of the body’s life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

102. “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

103. “Mutants are necessary to maintain the essence of our selves. Our genomes has negotiated a fragile balance between counterpoised forces, pairing strand with opposite strand, mixing past and future, pitting memory against desire. It is the most human of all things that we possess. Its stewardship may be the ultimate test of knowledge and discernment of our species.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

104. “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

105. “An Irish surgeon, Denis Burkitt, discovered an aggressive form of lymphoma – now called Burkitt’s lymphoma –.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

106. “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

107. “There is no permanent status quo in nature,” Muller later wrote. “All is a process of adjustment and readjustment, or else eventual failure.” By.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

108. “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

109. “Cancer, we now know, is a disease caused by the uncontrolled growth of a single cell.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

110. “How many of us have asked the question, ‘If this great country of ours can put a man on the moon why can’t we find a cure for cancer?”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

111. “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

112. “I don’t know why I deserved the illness in the first place, but then I don’t know why I deserved to be cured. Leukemia is like that. It mystifies you. It changes your life.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

113. “Leukemia was a malignant proliferation of white cells in the blood. It was cancer in a molten, liquid form.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

114. “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

115. “Most days, I go home and I feel rejuvenated. I feel ebullient.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

116. “The approach required more persistence than imagination, but it produced remarkable results.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

117. “The gene provides an organizing principle for modern biology – and it tantalizes us with the prospect of controlling our bodies and fates.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

118. “Today when I see a patient with CML, I tell them that the disease is an indolent leukemia with an excellent prognosis, that they will usually live their functional life span provided they take an oral medicine, Gleevec, for the rest of their lives.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

119. “Our encounter with cancer has rounded us off; it has smoothed and polished us like river rocks.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

120. “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

121. “Prostate cancer represents a full third of all cancer incidence in men – sixfold that of leukemia and lymphoma.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

122. “A major hindrance to cancer effort has been a chronic, severe shortage of funds – a situation that is not generally recognized.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

123. “Why did Kaplan succeed where others had failed? First, because Kaplan meticulously restricted radiotherapy to patients with early-stage disease. He went to exhaustive lengths to stage patients before unleashing radiation on them. By.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

127. “In Lewis Carroll’s poem, when the hunters finally capture the deceptive Snark, it reveals itself not to be a foreign beast, but one of the human hunters sent to trap it. And so it had turned out with cancer. Cancer genes came from within the human genome. Indeed the Greeks had been peculiarly prescient yet again in their use of the term oncos. Cancer was intrinsically “loaded” in our genome.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

128. “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

129. “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

130. “It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

131. “But another truth should be foremost in mind: that what we call nature today is a kinder, gentler, more depauperate world than at any time since at least the late Paleozoic, some 300 million years ago. Nature is not a temple but a ruin. A beautiful ruin, but a ruin all the same.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “In China, lung cancer is already a leading cause of death attributable to smoking in men.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

137. “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

138. “Illness might progressively vanish so might identity. Grief might be diminished, but so might tenderness. Traumas might be erased but so might history. Infirmities might disappear, but so might vulnerability. Chance would become mitigated, but so, inevitably, would choice.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

139. “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

140. “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

141. “The campaign against cancer, Farber learned, was much like a political campaign: it needed icons, mascots, images, slogans – the strategies of advertising as much as the tools of science. For any illness to rise to political prominence, it needed to be marketed, just as a political campaign needed marketing. A disease needed to be transformed politically before it could be transformed scientifically.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

142. “I came here to get treatment, not consolations about hospice,” she finally said, glowering with fury.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

146. “Thus, for 3,000 years and more, this disease has been known to the medical profession. And for 3,000 years and more, humanity has been knocking at the door of the medical profession for a “cure.” – Fortune, March 1937.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

147. “The job’s most inventive academic perk, perhaps, was his new title: the Curator of the Museum and the Inspector of the Dead.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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