“Mutants are necessary to maintain the essence of our selves. Our genomes has negotiated a fragile balance between counterpoised forces, pairing strand… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“When scientists underestimate complexity, they fall prey to the perils of unintended consequences.” — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“It is the impulse of science to understand nature, and the impulse of technology to try to manipulate it. Recombinant DNA had… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“The daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born with a precocious scientific intellect and a thirst for chemical knowledge, Elion had completed a master's… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“In God we trust. All others [must] have data. - Bernard Fisher” — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“Most of the selected essays share a common thread: They describe how science happens.” — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“Technology, I said before, is most powerful when it enables transitions—between linear and circular motion (the wheel), or between real and virtual… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
I had seen cancer at a more cellular level as a researcher. The first time I entered the cancer ward, my first… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“Illness might progressively vanish so might identity. Grief might be diminished, but so might tenderness. Traumas might be erased but so might… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“In the late 1970s, scientists working on gene-silencing discovered that the attachment of a small molecule-a methyl group-to DNA was correlated with… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“ Pierre and Marie (then Maria Sklodowska , a penniless Polish immigrant living in a garret in Paris) had met at the… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“The universe,” the twentieth-century biologist J. B. S. Haldane liked to say, “is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“One researcher estimates that the effect of the D4DR explains only about 5 percent of the variance in novelty-seeking behavior among individuals.… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“It is the impulse of science to try to understand nature, and the impulse of technology to try to manipulate it.” — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“In the folklore of science, there is the often-told story of the moment of discovery: the quickening of the pulse, the spectral… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“The cloning of human genes allowed scientists to manufacture proteins-and the synthesis of proteins opened the possibility of targeting the millions of… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
Postwar U.S. was the world's leader in science and technology. The investment in science research was staggering. — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“Bill by bill, and letter by letter, his scientific imagination was slowly choked by administrative work.” — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“A furious researcher stumbled out of one of the lab buildings and shouted, 'I'm a scientist working on the AIDS cure. Why… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“Without equality, he argued, eugenics would degenerate into yet another mechanism by which the powerful could control the weak.” — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“Labs, too, can become machines. In science, it is more often a pejorative description than a complimentary one: an efficient, thrumming, technically… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“Ants have a powerful caste system. A colony typically contains ants that carry out radically different roles and have markedly different body… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“Freaks become norms, and norms become extinct. Monster by monster, evolution advanced” — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
Most days, I go home and I feel rejuvenated. I feel ebullient. — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“A note of caution: epigenetics is also on the verge of transforming into a dangerous idea. Epigenetic modifications of genes can potentially superpose historical… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
When you immerse yourself in medicine you realise that hope is not absolute. It's not that simple. — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“I had a novice's hunger for history, but also a novice's inability to envision it.” — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“Any extrapolation of history into the future presupposes an environment of static discovery—an oxymoron.” — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“Six decades and two years, no more than a passing glance of time, separate Mendel's initial experiments on peas and the court-mandated sterilization of… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“We now know that cells have ancient detectors that recognize viral genes and stamp them with chemical marks, like cancellation signs, to prevent their… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“Familial schizophrenia (like normal human features such as intelligence and temperament) is thus highly heritable but only moderately inheritable. In other words, genes-hereditary determinants-are… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“If you prefer an “academic life” as a retreat from reality, do not go into biology. This field is for a man or woman… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“But the pigs--seventy pounds of porcine weight that did not take kindly to weekly endoscopies--did not sprout any ulcers. And testing the theory on… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
“One of the four genes used by Yamanaka to reverse cellular fate is called c-myc. Myc, the rejuvenating factor, is no ordinary gene: it… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
A breast cancer might turn out to have a close resemblance to a gastric cancer. And this kind of reorganization of cancer in terms… — Siddhartha Mukherjee Copy Share Image
