Top 78 Quotes & Sayings by Siddhartha Mukherjee - Page 2

It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance's link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety - one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars.

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

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

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 few months. In 2009, bound to a wheelchair, he watched his daughter graduate from college. The wheelchair had nothing to do with his cancer. The man had fallen down while coaching his youngest son's baseball team.

Sandeep Jauhar’s Doctored is a passionate and necessary book that asks difficult questions about the future of medicine. The narrative is gripping, and the writing is marvelous. But it was the gravity of the problem—so movingly told—that grabbed and kept my attention throughout this remarkable work.

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

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 sources of X-rays. Pierre and Marie (then Maria Sklodowska, a penniless Polish immigrant living in a garret in Paris) had met at the Sorbonne and been drawn to each other because of a common interest in magnetism.

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

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 why worms age, or even how birds learn songs-and you will end up, in fewer than six genetic steps, connecting with a proto-oncogene or tumor suppressor.

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

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.

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.

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

History repeats, but science reverberates.

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?

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

It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.

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 metaphors. But this is not a metaphor. Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.