Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Siddhartha Mukherjee
Age: 54
Born: 1970
Born: January 1
Academic
Essayist
Non-Fiction Writer
Oncologist
Physician
Physician Writer
Scientist
New Delhi district
Years
Cancer
Discovery
Normal
Lasts
Oncology
Last
Mutated
Idea
Seminal
Often
Genes
Ideas
Versions

More quotes by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Image
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
Image
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
Image
Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Image
I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Image
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
Image
Most days, I go home and I feel rejuvenated. I feel ebullient.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Image
This was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A positive attitude does not cure cancer, any more than a negative one causes it.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Image
Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Image
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
Image
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
Image
History repeats, but science reverberates.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Image
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
Image
I believe the biggest breakthroughs on cancer could come from brilliant researchers based in India.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Image
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
Image
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
Image
One swallow is a coincidence, but two swallows make summer.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Image
It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.
Siddhartha Mukherjee