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

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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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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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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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There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression.
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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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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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I believe the biggest breakthroughs on cancer could come from brilliant researchers based in India.
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History repeats, but science reverberates.
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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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Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.
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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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Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for.
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Most days, I go home and I feel rejuvenated. I feel ebullient.
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A positive attitude does not cure cancer, any more than a negative one causes it.
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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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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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