Biographies Quote by Siddhartha Mukherjee

“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 for 4,000 years, and I wanted to know what was its birth, what is its mind, its personality, its psyche?” quote by Siddhartha Mukherjee — Download Open image

“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 for 4,000 years, and I wanted to know what was its birth, what is its mind, its personality, its psyche?”

Siddhartha Mukherjee

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More by Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

Siddhartha Mukherjee

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“A note of caution: epigenetics is also on the verge of transforming into a dangerous idea. Epigenetic modifications of genes can potentially superpose historical and environmental information on cells and genomes—but this capacity is speculative, limited, idiosyncratic, and unpredictable: a parent with an experience of starvation produces children with obesity and overnourishment, while a father with the experience of tuberculosis,…

Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

Siddhartha Mukherjee

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“I had a novice's hunger for history, but also a novice's inability to envision it.”

Siddhartha Mukherjee

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“Any extrapolation of history into the future presupposes an environment of static discovery—an oxymoron.”

Siddhartha Mukherjee

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“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

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“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

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“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 crucially important to the future development of the disorder. If you possess a particular combination of genes, the chance of developing the illness is extremely high: hence the striking concordance among identical twins. On the other…

Siddhartha Mukherjee

“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

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“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 humans was ethically impossible: how could one justify infecting a human with a new, uncharacterized species of bacteria to prove that it caused gastritis and predisposed to cancer? In July 1984, with his experiments stalled and…

Siddhartha Mukherjee

“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 is one of the most forceful regulators of cell growth and metabolism known in biology. Activated abnormally, it can certainly coax an adult cell back into an embryo-like state, thereby enabling Yamanaka's cell-fate reversal experiment (this…

Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

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Explore all 213 Siddhartha Mukherjee quotes

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All Philosophy is Biography

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I hope any poem I've ever written could stand on its own and not need to be a part of biography, critical theory or cultural studies. I don't want to give a poetry reading and have to provide the story behind the poem in order for it to make sense to an audience. I certainly don't want the poem to…

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The richly cadenced prose is hypnotic, the research prodigious, the analysis acute, the mood spellbinding, and the cast of characters mythic in scale. I…

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