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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.

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
Writing
Cardinals
Think
Rule
Thinking
Learned
Learning
Read
Write
Firsts
First
Cardinal

More quotes by Siddhartha Mukherjee

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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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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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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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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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History repeats, but science reverberates.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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One swallow is a coincidence, but two swallows make summer.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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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'.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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Most days, I go home and I feel rejuvenated. I feel ebullient.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
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There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression.
Siddhartha Mukherjee