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" 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. "

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" 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

Way

Treat

Breast Cancer

" In a spiritual sense, a positive attitude may help you get through chemotherapy and surgery and radiation and what have you. But a positive mental attitude does not cure cancer - any more than a negative mental attitude causes cancer. "

" One day, I had a patient who was going through chemotherapy who came to me and said, 'I'm going to go on with what I'm doing, but I need you to tell me what it is that I'm fighting.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

First Time

Death

" 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. "

" Cancer is not just a dividing cell. It's a complex disease: It invades, it metastasizes, it evades the immune system. "

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

" 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. "

" Sidney Farber was a pathologist. He was called a doctor of the dead. He was a pathologist who sort of lived in the basement of the children's hospital in Boston, and he became very interested in childhood leukemia. And Farber began to inject this drug, aminopterin, into young kids, in order to see if he could get a remission. "

" I'm human, we all are - all doctors are - and grieving is a natural part of medicine. As a doctor, grieving is a natural part of medicine. If you deny that, again, you'd get into this trap of curing and victory. I think grief is very important. "

" Robert Sandler is a child who died when he was three years old, and he is a child who was the first child that we know of to be treated with chemotherapy. "

" There's a phrase in Shakespeare: he refers to it as the 'hidden imposthume', and this idea of a hidden swelling is seminal to cancer. But even in more contemporary writing it's called 'the big C'. "

" Every era casts cancer in its own image. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Life

Realize

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If something is good, more is not necessarily better. Not always. "

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Better

Always

" 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. "

" What does it mean to be an oncologist? It means that you get to sit in at a moment of another person's life that is so hyper-acute, and not just because they're medically ill. It's also a moment of hope and expectation and concern. "

" 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. "

" I could write a thesis on the physiology of vision. But I had no way to look through the fabric of confabulation spun by a man with severe lung disease who was prescribed 'home oxygen', but gave a false address out of embarrassment because he had no 'home.' "

" 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. "

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Say

Progress

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

" We now have poured in an enormous amount of resources into cancer. The National Cancer Institute Project, you know, runs about $5 billion a year. That's a large amount of money, but let's not be grandiose about the amount of money we're actually spending on a problem that is attacking us at the most fundamental level of the human species. "