Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes

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

Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for.

History repeats, but science reverberates.

I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read.

All cancers are alike but they are alike in a unique way.

There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression.

Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos

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.

One swallow is a coincidence, but two swallows make summer.

I think when we use 'stress', we are often using a kind of dummy word to try to fit many different things into one big category.

A positive attitude does not cure cancer, any more than a negative one causes it.

Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.

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.

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.

Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.

Could your medicine be a cell, not a pill? Could your medicine be an organ that's created outside the body? Could your medicine be an environment?

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'.

It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.

It is hard to look at the tumor and not come away with the feeling that one has encountered a powerful monster in its infancy

I believe the biggest breakthroughs on cancer could come from brilliant researchers based in India.

Most days, I go home and I feel rejuvenated. I feel ebullient.

This was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation.

Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery.

Postwar U.S. was the world's leader in science and technology. The investment in science research was staggering.

There's a phrase in Shakespeare: he refers to it as the 'hidden imposthume', and this idea of a hidden swelling is seminal to cancer. But even in more contemporary writing it's called 'the big C'.

Probably the most important reason we are seeing more cancers than before is because the population is ageing overall. And cancer is an age-related disease.

I am a scientist and I am a physician. So I write papers.

When you immerse yourself in medicine you realise that hope is not absolute. It's not that simple.

My memory of my household is of one immersed in books and music. I have a very intimate relationship with Bengali literature, particularly Tagore, and my interest besides reading then was music.

What we do in the laboratory is we try to design drugs that will not just eradicate cancer cells but will eradicate their homes.

In God we trust. All others [must] have data. - Bernard Fisher

And this was to save rats, right? Or mice? You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors?

The cure of even one solid cancer in adults, Farber knew, would singularly revolutionize oncology. It would provide the most concrete proof that this was a winnable war.

Natures and features last until the grave

Freaks become norms, and norms become extinct. Monster by monster, evolution advanced

Intelligence...[is] not marathon rac[e]: there is no fixed criteria for success, no start or finish lines -- and running sideways or backwards, might secure victory.

Without equality, he argued, eugenics would degenerate into yet another mechanism by which the powerful could control the weak.