Top 280 Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “The word code comes from the Latin caudex, the wooden pith of a tree on which scribes carved their writing.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

202. “A mutation is only “abnormal” in a statistical sense: it is the less common variant. The desire to homogenize and “normalize” humans must be counterbalanced against biological imperatives to maintain diversity and abnormalcy. Normalcy is the antithesis of evolution.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

203. “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

204. “The experiments progress slowly,” Mendel wrote. “At first a certain amount of patience was needed, but I soon found that matters went better when I was conducting several experiments simultaneously.” With multiple crosses in parallel, the production of data accelerated. Gradually, he began to discern patterns in the data-unanticipated constancies, conserved ratios, numerical rhythms. He had tapped, at last, into heredity’s inner logic.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

205. “We seek constancy in heredity – and find its opposite: variation. Mutants are necessary to maintain the essence of our selves. Our.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

206. “I had a novice’s hunger for history, but also a novice’s inability to envision it.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

207. “It is here that an insight enters our discussion – and it might sound peculiar at first: a test can only be interpreted sanely in the context of prior probabilities.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

208. “The word genocide shares its root with gene – and for good reason: the Nazis used the vocabulary of genes and genetics to launch, justify, and sustain their agenda.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

209. “Six decades and two years, no more than a passing glance of time, separate Mendel’s initial experiments on peas and the court-mandated sterilization of Carrie Buck. Yet in this brief flash of six decades, the gene had transformed from an abstract concept in a botanical experiment to a powerful instrument of social control.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

210. “Like musicians, like mathematicians – like elite athletes – scientists peak early and dwindle fast.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

211. “It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe,” James Gleick wrote.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

212. “In 1905, still struggling for an alternative, Bateson coined a word of his own. Genetics, he called it: the study of heredity and variation-the word ultimately derived from the Greek genno, “to give birth.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

213. “Every genetic “illness” is a mismatch between an organism’s genome and its environment.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

214. “Never before in history, and never with such insidiousness, had genes been so effortlessly conflated with identity, identity with defectiveness, and defectiveness with extermination.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

215. “There is no history; there is only biography,” Emerson once wrote.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

216. “With DNA as with words, the sequence carries the meaning. Dissolve DNA into its constituent bases, and it turns into a primordial four-letter alphabet soup.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

217. “Incomplete penetrance” meant that even if a mutation was present in the genome, its capacity to penetrate into a physical or morphological feature was not always complete.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

218. “There was, perhaps, no more bizarre illustration of the conflation between cleansing and racial cleansing than a law that barred Jews from employing “German maids” in their houses.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

219. “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

220. “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 in air; physical connectivity to virtual connectivity.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

221. “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

222. “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

223. “Life’s definition, as it stands now, is akin to a menu. It is not one thing but a series of things, a set of behaviors, a series of processes, not a single property. To be living, an organism must have the capacity to reproduce, to grow, to metabolize, to adapt to stimuli, and to maintain its internal milieu.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

224. “Without equality, he argued, eugenics would degenerate into yet another mechanism by which the powerful could control the weak.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

225. “Without this variation – without deep genetic diversity – an organism might ultimately lose its capacity to evolve.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

226. “Junk science props up totalitarian regimes. And totalitarian regimes produce junk science.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

227. “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

228. “The mother and the father were two independent sides and the child was the third – the biological hypotenuse to the parents’ two lines.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

230. “Los dictadores depravados y los estados depredadores no son un requisito indispensable para la eugenesia.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

231. “The notes were cryptic, spontaneous, and raw. On one page, he drew a diagram that would return to haunt his thoughts: rather than all species radiating out from the central hub of divine creation, perhaps they arose like branches of a “tree,” or like rivulets from a river, with an ancestral stem that divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller branches toward dozens of modern descendants.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

232. “The most extreme novelty seekers-the greatest among the Gatsbys-seemed virtually addicted to stimulation and excitement. Scores aside, even their test-taking behavior was temperamental. They left questions unanswered. They paced the room, trying to look for ways to get out. They were frequently, hopelessly, maddeningly bored.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

233. “A gene,” Beadle wrote in 1945, “can be visualized as directing the final configuration of a protein molecule.” This was the “action of the gene” that a generation of biologists had been trying to comprehend: a gene “acts” by encoding information to build a protein, and the protein actualizes the form or function of the organism.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

234. “If you prefer an “academic life” as a retreat from reality, do not go into biology. This field is for a man or woman who wishes to get even closer to life. – Hermann Muller We.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

235. “Genes, the Pajama paper argued, were not just passive blueprints. Even though every cell contains the same set of genes – an identical genome – the selective activation or repression of particular subsets of genes allows an individual cell to respond to its environments. The genome was an active blueprint – capable of deploying selected parts of its code at different times and in different circumstances.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

236. “Over a man’s life, his semen grew into a mobile library of every part of the body – a condensed distillate of the self. This.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

237. “Wallace Sayre, the political scientist, liked to quip that academic disputes are often the most vicious because the stakes are so overwhelmingly low.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

238. “The tightness of genetic linkage, in short, was a surrogate for the physical proximity of genes on chromosomes: by measuring how often two features-blond-hairedness and blue-eyedness-were linked or unlinked, you could measure the distance between their genes on the chromosome.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

239. “They were self-appointed jesters in a court of fools. The.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

240. “Living humans are endowed with the evolutionary history of our species in our genomes. It is as if we permanently carry a photograph of each of our ancestors in our wallets.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

241. “Morbidly interested in genetics and medical research, Mengele rose to become physician in chief at Auschwitz, where he unleashed a series of monstrous experiments on twins.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

242. “Units of hereditary information, encoded in DNA and packaged on chromosomes, are transmitted through sperm and egg into an embryo, and from the embryo to every living cell in an organism’s body.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

243. “It is the impulse of science to try to understand nature, and the impulse of technology to try to manipulate it. Recombinant DNA had pushed genetics from the realm of science into the realm of technology.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

244. “Evolution can craft perfectly adapted organisms, but not in an intentional manner: it is not just a “blind watchmaker”, but also a forgetful one. Its sole driver is survival and selection; its only memory is mutation.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

245. “We can now “read” human genomes, and we can “write” human genomes in a manner inconceivable just three or four years ago.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

246. “The picture that emerged from the Minnesota study was not that reared-apart twins were identical, but that they shared a powerful tendency toward similar or convergent behaviors. What was common to them was not identity, but its first derivative.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

247. “An upright organism with opposable thumbs is thus built from a script, but built to go off script. We call one such unique variant of one such organism a “self.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

248. “One researcher estimates that the effect of the D4DR explains only about 5 percent of the variance in novelty-seeking behavior among individuals. D4DR is likely only one of many genes-as many as ten-that determine this particular aspect of personality.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

249. “As I write this, organisms endowed with genomes are learning to change the heritable features of organisms endowed with genomes.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

250. “The original Watson and Crick model of DNA, with its hammered metal plates and rickety rods twisting precariously around a steel laboratory stand, is housed behind a glass case. The model looks like a latticework corkscrew invented by a madman, or an impossibly fragile spiral staircase that might connect the human past to its future. Crick’s handwritten scribbles – A, C, T, and G – still adorn the plates.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee