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" 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
Blood
Work
Cancer
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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Memory
Relationship
Reading
" 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. "
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Old
Three
Child
" 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. "
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Things
Dying
Trend
" Nearly every one of the genes that turns out to be a key player in cancer has a vital role in the normal physiology of an organism. The genes that enable our brains and blood cells to develop are implicated in cancer. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Blood
Genes
Cells
" If something is good, more is not necessarily better. Not always. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
More
Better
Always
" 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
Like
Say
Progress
" Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Over
Rarely
Self-Doubt
" Science is among the most profoundly human of our activities. Far from being subsumed by the dehumanising effects of technology, science, in fact, remains our last stand against it. "
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Science
Human
Last
" 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
Look
Say
You
" 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. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Mindset
Die
Change
" 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.' "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Disease
Vision
Way
" Cancer is not one disease but many diseases. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Diseases
Disease
Cancer
" 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
Sense
Normal
Cold
" What we do in the laboratory is we try to design drugs that will not just eradicate cancer cells but will eradicate their homes. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Will
Cancer
Cells
" 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. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Now
Young
Cancer
" We know cancer is caused ultimately via a link between the environment and genes. There are genes inside cells that tell cells to grow and the same genes tell cells to stop growing. When you deregulate these genes, you unleash cancer. Now, what disrupts these genes? Mutations. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Know
Growing
Grow
" 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. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
You
Spiritual
Positive
" Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Quality
Writing
Process
" 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. So, in fact, the gamut of medical intervention is enormous. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Physician
Medical
Down
" 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. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Diversity
Cancer
Principles
" 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. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Saying
Political
Conquer
" Cancer is not just a dividing cell. It's a complex disease: It invades, it metastasizes, it evades the immune system. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Disease
Just
System
" 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. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
See
Children
Doctor
" 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
Cancer
Big
Difference
" 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. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Process
Become
Birds
" 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
You
Cancer
Cells
" Every era casts cancer in its own image. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Image
Own
Cancer
" The history is important because science is a discipline deeply immersed in history. In other words, every time you perform an experiment in science or in medicine, what you're actually doing is you're answering someone, answering a question raised by someone in the past. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
History
Science
Past