Top 280 Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The dinosaurs who studied dinosaurs would soon become extinct in their own right. Watson.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

153. “I do not wish to achieve immortality through my works. I wish to achieve immortality by not dying. – Woody Allen.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

154. “Should I refuse my dinner302 because I don’t understand the digestive system?”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

155. “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

156. “By the early 1940s, asking about a connection between tobacco and cancer was like asking about an association between sitting and cancer.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

157. “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

158. “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

159. “Bill by bill, and letter by letter, his scientific imagination was slowly choked by administrative work.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

191. “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

192. “The double-helix has solved all three of the major challenges of genetic physiology using ingenious variations on the same theme. Mirror-image chemicals are used to generate mirror-image chemicals, reflections used to reconstruct the orginal. Pairs used to maintain the fidelity and fixity of information. “Monet is but an eye,” Cezanne once said of his friend, “but, God, what an eye.” DNA, by the same logic, is but a chemical-but, God, what a chemical.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

194. “But while Darwin’s encounters with the “natives” of South America in the 1830s had strengthened his belief in the common ancestry of humans, Galton only saw difference: “I saw enough of savage races to give me material to think about all the rest of my life.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

195. “More than the enormity of gene numbers, the diversity of gene types, or the originality of gene function, it is the ingenuity of our genome that is the secret to our complexity.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

196. “Dimly, as if through a veil, geneticists were beginning to visualize patterns and themes: threads, strings, maps, crossings, broken and unbroken lines, chromosomes that carried information in a coded and compressed form. But no one had seen a gene in action or knew its material essence. The central quest of the study of heredity seemed like an object perceived only through its shadows, tantalizingly invisible to science.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

197. “The word code comes from the Latin caudex, the wooden pith of a tree on which scribes carved their writing.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

198. “To see,” the poet Paul Valery once wrote, “is to forget the name of the things that one sees.” To see DNA is to forget its name or its chemical formula. Like the simplest of human tools-hammer, scythe, bellows, ladder, scissors-the function of the molecule can be entirely comprehended from its structure. To “see” DNA is to immediately perceive its function as a repository of information. The most important molecule in biology needs no name to be understood.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

199. “Illness is used to define wellness. Abnormalcy marks the boundaries of normalcy. Deviance demarcates the limits of conformity.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee