Top 280 Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Should I refuse my dinner302 because I don’t understand the digestive system?”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

152. “Oncologists and their patients are bound, it seems, by an intense subatomic force. So, albeit in a much smaller sense, this was a victory for me as well. I sat at Carla’s table and watched her pour a glass of water for herself, unpurified and straight from the sink. She glowed radiantly, her eyes half-closed, as if the compressed autobiography of the last five years were flashing through a private and internal cinema screen. Her.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

153. “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

154. “Genes must carry out programmed responses to environments – otherwise, there would be no conserved form. But they must also leave exactly enough room for the vagaries of chance to stick. We call this intersection “fate.” We call our responses to it “choice.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

155. “The God of Worms had evidently left tiny loopholes of chance in the worm’s design, but He still wouldn’t throw dice.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

156. “Third, the relentless cycle of mutation, selection, and survival creates a cancer cell that has acquired several additional properties besides uncontrolled growth.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “Great science emerges out of great contradiction.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

161. “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

162. “The dinosaurs who studied dinosaurs would soon become extinct in their own right. Watson.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

163. “I believe the biggest breakthroughs on cancer could come from brilliant researchers based in India.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

164. “A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade, regardless of its mechanical skill.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

165. “The very effect of X-rays killing rapidly dividing cells – DNA damage – also created cancer-causing mutations in genes.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

166. “To understand cancer as a whole, he reasoned, you needed to start at the bottom of its complexity, in its basement.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

167. “Cancer researchers knew that X-rays, soot, cigarette smoke, and asbestos represented vastly more common risk factors for human cancers.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

168. “Natures and features last until the grave.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

169. “In 1870, the per capita consumption in America was less than one cigarette per year. A mere thirty years later, Americans were consuming 3.5 billion cigarettes and 6 billion cigars every year. By 1953, the average annual consumption of cigarettes had reached thirty-five hundred per person. On average, an adult American smoked ten cigarettes every day, an average Englishman twelve, and a Scotsman nearly twenty.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

170. “It is one thing to try to understand how genes influence human identity or sexuality or temperament. It is quite another thing to imagine altering identity or sexuality or behavior by altering genes.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

171. “My book is an attempt to answer her question by going back to the origin of the disease and showing its development through history. I called it “a biography of cancer,” because it draws a portrait of an illness over time.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

172. “Instead of trying to tailor the disease to fit his medicine, Kaplan learned to tailor his medicine to fit the right disease. This simple principle – the meticulous matching of a particular therapy to a particular form and stage of cancer – would eventually be given its due merit in cancer therapy.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

173. “By 1926, cancer had become the nation’s second most common killer, just behind heart disease.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

174. “The chances in some cases are infinitesimal, but the potential is still there. This is about all that patients need to know and it is about all that patients want to know.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

175. “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

176. “Soot is a mixture of chemicals that would eventually be found to contain several carcinogens.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

177. “Proto-oncogenes and tumor suppressors are the molecular pivots of the cell. They are the gatekeepers of cell division, and the division of cells is so central to our physiology that genes and pathways that coordinate this process intersect with nearly every other aspect of our biology. 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.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

178. “There is a difference between the “cost” of a drug and the “price” of a drug. A pill of Gleevec – I mean, the chemical that we call Gleevec – can be synthesized.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

179. “The greatest clinicians who I know seem to have a sixth sense for biases. They understand, almost instinctively, when prior bits of scattered knowledge apply to their patients – but, more important, when they don’t apply to their patients.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

180. “A population of organisms in the wild must have enough natural variation such that winners and losers can be picked. A flock of finches on an island, for instance, needs to possess enough intrinsic diversity in beak sizes such that a season of drought might be able to select birds with the toughest or longest beaks. Take that diversity away – force all finches to have the same beak – and selection comes up empty-handed. All the birds go extinct in a fell swoop. Evolution grinds to a halt. But.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

181. “A cancer patient today has a team that works around him or her, including nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, and, in some cases, pain and palliative medicine experts.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

182. “In some nations, cancer will surpass heart disease to become the most common cause of death.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

183. “Portions of this interview first appeared in OncNurse magazine in February 2011. We are grateful to Christin Melton for her questions.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

184. “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

185. “Unidentified flying objects, abominable snowmen, the Loch Ness monster and human cancer viruses. – Medical World News, 1974, on four “mysteries” widely reported and publicized but never seen.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

186. “And despite its many idiosyncrasies, leukemia possessed a singularly attractive feature: it could be measured. 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

187. “Li had stumbled on a deep and fundamental principle of oncology: cancer needed to be systemically treated long after every visible sign of it had vanished.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

188. “In the beginning, there was simplicity. – Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

189. “Halsted’s “cancer storehouse” grew far beyond its original walls at Hopkins. His ideas entered oncology, then permeated its vocabulary, then its psychology, its ethos, and its self-image. When radical surgery fell, an entire culture of surgery thus collapsed with it. The radical mastectomy is rarely, if ever, performed by surgeons today.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

190. “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: the “gene,” the fundamental unit of heredity, and the basic unit of all biological information. I.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

191. “The secret to battling cancer, then, is to find means to prevent these mutations from occurring in susceptible cells, or to find means to eliminate the mutated cells without compromising normal growth. The conciseness of that statement belies the enormity of the task. Malignant growth and normal growth are so genetically intertwined that unbraiding the two might be one of the most significant scientific challenges faced by our species.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

192. “In 1977, when Fred Sanger had sequenced the genome of the phiX virus, with 5,386 bases of DNA, that number represented the outer limit of gene-sequencing capability. The human genome contains 3,095,677,412 base pairs-representing a scale shift of 574,000-fold.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

193. “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. – Alexander Pope, Essay on Man.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

194. “Neither variant was morally or biologically superior; each was just more or less adapted to a particular environment.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

195. “Indeed, the mean height of the sons of exceptionally tall fathers tended to be slightly lower than the father’s height-and closer to the population’s average-as if an invisible force were always dragging extreme features toward the center. This discovery-called regression to the mean-would have a powerful effect on the science measurement and the concept of variance. It would be Galton’s most important contribution to statistics.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

196. “The genetic code is universal... there is nothing particularly special about human genes.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

197. “My father walked around the house with me. It was smaller than I had expected – as places reconstructed from borrowed memories inevitably are – but also duller and dustier. Memories sharpen the past; it is reality that decays.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

198. “We lost a chromosome, but gained a thumb.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

199. “Why, you might ask, do the medical mysteries of the Covid-19 pandemic sit at the center of a book on cell biology? Because cell biology sits at the center of the medical mysteries.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

200. “Three profoundly destabilizing scientific ideas ricochet through the twentieth century, trisecting it into three unequal parts: the atom, the byte, the gene. Each is foreshadowed by an earlier century, but dazzles into full prominence in the twentieth. Each begins its life as a rather abstract scientific concept, but grows to invade multiple human discourses – thereby transforming culture, society, politics, and language.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee