Siddhartha Mukherjee quotes

I left Delhi in 1989 and remember very little of how life used to be then. Increasingly, in my recent visits to Delhi, I've started to realize that the city has become intellectually very lively. It makes me want to discover the city over and over again. (Siddhartha Mukherjee)

Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

I think the way we think about cancer, the way we treat cancer, has dramatically changed in the last century. There is an enormous amount of options that a physician can provide today, right down from curing patients, treating patients or providing patients with psychic solace or pain relief.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Probably the most important reason we are seeing more cancers than before is because the population is ageing overall. And cancer is an age-related disease.

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 of its internal genetic anatomy has really changed the way we treat and approach cancer in general.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read. (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?

Siddhartha Mukherjee

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.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

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 decaying quality was very interesting to me, and it seemed that one could explore the idea that every age defined its own illness.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

I think when we use 'stress', we are often using a kind of dummy word to try to fit many different things into one big category.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

I believe the biggest breakthroughs on cancer could come from brilliant researchers based in India.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

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.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

History repeats, but science reverberates.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

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.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

Siddhartha Mukherjee

The trick to my writing, it turned out, was doing so exclusively in bed. The minute I even dared to discipline myself and write at the desk, I produced mounds of nonsense. Yet, sitting in bed, I wrote easily, effortlessly, fluidly. I became the master of perfect indiscipline. (Siddhartha Mukherjee)

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.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

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.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, 'You know, that doesn't look right'.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

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.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

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Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha Mukherjee - Image

Photo: Moody College of Communication from Austin, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0

Occupation: Indian Scientist
Born: 1970
Quotes count: 47

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