Words matter. These are the best Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Because I work on leukemia, the image of cancer I carry in my mind is that of blood. I imagine that doctors who work on breast cancer or pancreatic cancer have very different visualizations.
We may have to learn to live with cancer rather than die of it. It means a big change in our mindset and how we do research. We haven’t quite reached there yet.
There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression.
There is a duality in recognising what an incredible disease it is – in terms of its origin, that it emerges out of a normal cell. It’s a reminder of what a wonderful thing a normal cell is. In a very cold, scientific sense, I think a cancer cell is a kind of biological marvel.
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.
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.
We don’t know why, but pancreatic cancer has a very interesting physiological link to depression. There seems to be a deep link, and we don’t know what it is.
Each of us knows a few or several young people whose lives have been devastated by cancer. I don’t mean to be nihilistic about it, but it is very much an active killer of people now.
A strong intuition is much more powerful than a weal test. Normals teach us rules; outliers teach us laws. For every perfect medical experiment, there is a perfect human bias.
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.
Some cancers are curable, while others are highly incurable. The spectrum is enormous. Metastatic pancreatic cancer is a highly incurable disease, whereas some leukemia forms are very curable. There is a big difference between one form and another.
When you immerse yourself in medicine you realise that hope is not absolute. It’s not that simple.
Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for.
The idea that cancer genes are sitting inside each and every one of our chromosomes, just waiting to be corrupted or inactivated and thereby unleashing cancer, is, of course, one of the seminal ideas of oncology.
Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.
Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery.
Cancer is not one disease but many diseases.
I think you would have to be a nihilist to say that we are not making progress on cancer, just like you’d have to be hubristically optimistic to say that we have conquered cancer.
There’s a rising cancer trend and, as I said, one of the major contributors is the overall ageing of the population – we aren’t dying of other things, so we’re dying of cancer.
Mary Lasker was an entrepreneur; she was a socialite. She was kind of a legendary networker. She became interested in saying, ‘Well, you know, if these diseases don’t have political support we’ll never conquer them.’ And she made, really, cancer her special cause.
Unlike other diseases, the vulnerability to cancer lies in ourselves. We always thought of disease as exogenous, but research into cancer has turned that idea on its head – as long as we live, grow, age, there will be cancer.
Most days, I go home and I feel rejuvenated. I feel ebullient.
It turns out that the very genes that turn on in cancer cells perform vital functions in normal cells. In other words, the very genes that allow our embryos to grow or our brains to grow, our bodies to grow, if you mutate them, if you distort them, then you unleash cancer.
The gene that enables birds to learn songs can become cancer-causing. There is no normal physiological process that can’t be bastardized by the disease.
