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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.

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
Term
Sophisticated
Five
Hardly
Felt
Nearly
Hippocrates
Years
Twenty
Oncology
Twenties
Taxonomy
Cancer
Overarching
Hundred
Naively
Modern
Coined

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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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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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All cancers are alike but they are alike in a unique way.
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History repeats, but science reverberates.
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Most days, I go home and I feel rejuvenated. I feel ebullient.
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One swallow is a coincidence, but two swallows make summer.
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Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos
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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 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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A positive attitude does not cure cancer, any more than a negative one causes it.
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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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It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.
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Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.
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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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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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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 believe the biggest breakthroughs on cancer could come from brilliant researchers based in India.
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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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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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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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