Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes

41 quotes in 714 categories

• It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.
• It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential…
• History repeats, but science reverberates.
• Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos
• Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.
• One swallow is a coincidence, but two swallows make summer.
• This was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation.
• In 2005, a man diagnosed with multiple myeloma asked me if he would be alive to watch his daughter graduate from high school in a…
• 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
• All cancers are alike but they are alike in a unique way.
• 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…
• In Paris, friend of Bequerel’s, a young physicist-chemist couple named Pierre and Marie Curie, began to scour the natural world for even more powerful chemical…
• I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read.
• 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…
• Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.
• 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…
• Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients.
• 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…
• I began wondering, can one really write a biography of an illness? But I found myself thinking of cancer as this character that has lived…
• I wanted to explore cancer not just biologically, but metaphorically. The idea that tuberculosis in the 19th century possessed the same kind of frightening and…

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