Quote

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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Siddhartha Mukherjee
Age: 54
Born: 1970
Born: January 1
Academic
Essayist
Non-Fiction Writer
Oncologist
Physician
Physician Writer
Scientist
New Delhi district
Mirrors
Warned
Scrappy
Cancer
Endowed
Hyperactive
Survival
Innate
Recapitulation
Core
Copies
Pathological
Existence
Metaphor
Susan
Body
Cells
Inventive
Life
Mirror
Molecular
Sontag
Illness
Metaphors
Fecund

More quotes by Siddhartha Mukherjee

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Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for.
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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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One swallow is a coincidence, but two swallows make summer.
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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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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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Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over 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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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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There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression.
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Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee