Top 280 Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “The capacity to manipulate genes represented nothing short of a transformation in genetics. We had learned a new language. We needed to convince ourselves, and everyone else, that we were responsible enough to use it.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

210. “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

211. “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

212. “A chicken, de Vries realized, was merely an egg’s way of making a better egg.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

213. “What if the solution to the structure of DNA could be achieved by the same “tricks” that Pauling had pulled? X-ray pictures would help, of course – but trying to determine structures of biological molecules using experimental methods, Crick argued, was absurdly laborious – “like trying to determine the structure of a piano by listening to the sound it made while being dropped down a flight of stairs.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

214. “The doctors pushing the frontiers of human medicine had forgotten to account for the common cold.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

215. “We loved them – and, yes, we killed them.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

216. “He drew the line at mice, but didn’t mind giving peas a chance.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

217. “The cloning of human genes allowed scientists to manufacture proteins-and the synthesis of proteins opened the possibility of targeting the millions of biochemical reactions in the human body. Proteins made it possible for chemists to intervene on previously impenetrable aspects of our physiology. The use of recombinant DNA to produce proteins thus marked a transition not just between one gene and one medicine, but between genes and a novel universe of drugs.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

218. “Darwin read the study, but he was not particularly convinced, damning his cousin with faint praise: “You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense, for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

219. “Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers – passageways – for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don’t think about what constitutes good or evil. They don’t care whether we are happy or unhappy. We’re just means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them. – Haruki Murakami, 1Q84.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

220. “Genes make proteins that regulate genes. Genes make proteins that replicate genes. The third R of the physiology of genes is a word that lies outside common human vocabulary, but is essential to the survival of our species: recombination – the ability to generate new combinations of genes.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

221. “In 1962, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for their discovery. Franklin was not included in the prize. She had died in 1958, at the age of thirty-seven, from diffusely metastatic ovarian cancer-an illness ultimately linked to mutations in genes.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

222. “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

223. “Choice,” in short, seems like an illusion devised by genes to propagate the selection of similar genes.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

224. “When a virus enters a cell, it sheds its coat, and begins to use the cell as a factory to copy its genes, and manufacture new coats, resulting in millions of new viruses budding out of the cell. Viruses have thus distilled their life cycle to its bare essentials. They live to infect and reproduce; they infect and reproduce to live.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

225. “Sound and light, Doppler argued, behaved according to universal and natural laws-even if these were deeply counterintuitive to ordinary viewers or listeners. Indeed, if you looked carefully, all the chaotic and complex phenomena of the world were the result of highly organized natural laws. But more commonly, a profoundly artificial ecperiment-loading trumpeters on a speeding train-might be necessary to understand and demonstrate these laws.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

226. “Eugenicists such as Priddy had long worried that the flooding of America by immigrants would precipitate “race suicide.” The right people were being overrun by the wrong people, they argued, and the right genes corrupted by the wrong ones. If.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

227. “An arcane microbial defense, devised by microbes, discovered by yogurt engineers, and reprogrammed by RNA biologists, has created a trapdoor to the transformative technology that geneticists had sought so longingly for decades: a method to achieve directed, efficient, and sequence-specific modification of the human genome.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

228. “Doctors have been waiting for this day for a thousand years,” the RAC’s chairman, Gerard.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

229. “We had seen the mutants – and they were us.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

230. “The biochemist’s approach pivots on concentration: find the protein by looking where it’s most likely to be concentrated, and distill it out of the mix. The geneticist’s approach, in contrast, pivots on information: find the gene by search for differences in “databases” created by two closely related cells and multiply the gene in bacteria via cloning. The biochemist distills forms; the gene cloner amplifies information.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

231. “It accommodates enough variation to make each one of us distinct, yet enough consistency to make each member of our species profoundly different from chimpanzees and bonobos, whose genomes are 96 percent identical to ours.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

232. “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

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

235. “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

236. “We now know that cells have ancient detectors that recognize viral genes and stamp them with chemical marks, like cancellation signs, to prevent their activation.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

238. “Unlike an antibody, a gunslinging sheriff itching for a showdown with a gang of molecular criminals in the center of town, a T cell is the gumshoe detective going door to door to look for perpetrators hiding inside.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

239. “It has repeated elements that appear frequently. A pesky, mysterious three-hundred-base-pair sequence called Alu appears and reappears tens of thousands of times, although its origin, function, or significance is unknown.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

240. “The controlled binding and unbinding of iron and oxygen- the cyclical rusting and unrusting of blood-allows effective oxygen delivery into tissues. Hemoglobin allows blood to carry seventyfold more oxygen than what could be dissolved in liquid blood alone.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

241. “In the typical comic book of the fifties, humans ran and hid from the terrifying tyranny of monsters. In X-Men, the mutants were forced to run and hide from the terrifying tyranny of normalcy.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

242. “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

243. “I doubt that I am overstating the case here: our capacity to understand and manipulate human genomes alters our conception of what it means to be “human.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

244. “The capacity to organise information or to perform goal-oriented tasks collapsed, and new words, fears, and anxieties emerged, as if from the netherworlds of the mind. In the end, all organized thinking began to crumble, entrapping the schizophrenic within a maze of mental rubble.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

245. “In May 1974, Cohen’s lab had published the “frog prince” experiment – the transfer of a frog gene into a bacterial cell. When asked by a colleague how he had identified the bacteria expressing the frog genes, Cohen had jokingly said that he had kissed the bacteria to check which ones would transform into a prince.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

246. “Two presentations, among all, stood out in their particularly chilling fervor. The first was an enthusiastic and precise exhibit by the Germans endorsing “race hygiene” – a grim premonition of times to come. Alfred.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

247. “For modern humans, that number has reached one: each of us can trace our mitochondrial lineage to a single human female who existed in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago. She is the common mother of our species. We do not know what she looked like, although her closest modern-day relatives are women of the San tribe from Botswana or Namibia. I find the idea of such a founding mother endlessly mesmerizing. In human genetics, she is known by a beautiful name – Mitochondrial Eve.”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

248. “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

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

250. “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