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Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients.

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
Self
Good
Agonize
Dispassionate
Patients
Physicians
Rarely
Patient
Doubt

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for.
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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 believe the biggest breakthroughs on cancer could come from brilliant researchers based in India.
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There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression.
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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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It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.
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All cancers are alike but they are alike in a unique way.
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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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