Top 280 Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

264. “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

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

266. “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

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Siddhartha Mukherjee