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Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.

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
Core
Inventive
Molecular
Endowed
Innate
Copies
Fecund
Cells
Scrappy
Cancer
Hyperactive
Survival
Recapitulation

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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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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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There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression.
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History repeats, but science reverberates.
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Cancer has enormous diversity and behaves differently: it's highly mutable, the evolutionary principles are very complicated and often its capacity to be constantly mystifying comes as a big challenge.
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All cancers are alike but they are alike in a unique way.
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It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.
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Most days, I go home and I feel rejuvenated. I feel ebullient.
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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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Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for.
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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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I believe the biggest breakthroughs on cancer could come from brilliant researchers based in India.
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Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos
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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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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 worms age, or even how birds learn songs-and you will end up, in fewer than six genetic steps, connecting with a proto-oncogene or tumor suppressor.
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I had seen cancer at a more cellular level as a researcher. The first time I entered the cancer ward, my first instinct was to withdraw from what was going on - the complexity, the death. It was a very bleak time.
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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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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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