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Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos

Siddhartha Mukherjee

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Siddhartha Mukherjee
Age: 54
Born: 1970
Born: January 1
Academic
Essayist
Non-Fiction Writer
Oncologist
Physician
Physician Writer
Scientist
New Delhi district
Disorganized
Organized
Chaos
Cancer

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Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.
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I think the way we think about cancer, the way we treat cancer, has dramatically changed in the last century. There is an enormous amount of options that a physician can provide today, right down from curing patients, treating patients or providing patients with psychic solace or pain relief.
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I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read.
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It felt—nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos—that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer.
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Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. Susan Sontag warned against overburdening an illness with metaphors. But this is not a metaphor. Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.
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Most days, I go home and I feel rejuvenated. I feel ebullient.
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I left Delhi in 1989 and remember very little of how life used to be then. Increasingly, in my recent visits to Delhi, I've started to realize that the city has become intellectually very lively. It makes me want to discover the city over and over again.
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History repeats, but science reverberates.
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One swallow is a coincidence, but two swallows make summer.
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A positive attitude does not cure cancer, any more than a negative one causes it.
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If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes.
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This was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation.
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All cancers are alike but they are alike in a unique way.
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Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients.
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Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.
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Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, 'You know, that doesn't look right'.
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There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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I believe the biggest breakthroughs on cancer could come from brilliant researchers based in India.
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If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients.
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Sandeep Jauhar’s Doctored is a passionate and necessary book that asks difficult questions about the future of medicine. The narrative is gripping, and the writing is marvelous. But it was the gravity of the problem—so movingly told—that grabbed and kept my attention throughout this remarkable work.
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