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" 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
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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. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Kind
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" 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
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" Every era casts cancer in its own image. "
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" 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. "
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" 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
Myself
Discipline
Perfect
" 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. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Things
Dying
Trend
" When you immerse yourself in medicine you realise that hope is not absolute. It's not that simple. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Hope
Yourself
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" Why did I write 'The Emperor of All Maladies?' A 56-year-old woman with an abdominal sarcoma, having undergone two remissions and a relapse, asked me to describe what she was battling. By the time I had finished answering her, I realised that I had written 600 pages. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
She
Woman
Why
" There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Depression
Moving
Cancer
" 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
Stress
Kind
Think
" 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. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Medicine
Doctor
Victory
" Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Prepared
Mind
You
" 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. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Money
Problem
Cancer
" If you take 100 breast-cancer samples, 100 types of cancer have 100 different hallmarks of mutated genes. You could be nihilistic and say, 'Oh, God, we'll never be able to tackle this!' But there are deep, systematic, organizational principles at work in all that diversity. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Deep
Diversity
God
" 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
" 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
" 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
Think
Today
Treat
" 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'. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Cancer
Hidden
Writing
" 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. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Science
Human
Last
" 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
" 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.' "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Day
You
Need
" 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
" Cancer is not one disease but many diseases. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Diseases
Disease
Cancer
" 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. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Life
Just Because
Hope
" 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. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Test
Medical
Perfect
" 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. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Old
Three
Child
" 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. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Live
Thought
Research
" 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
" 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
" Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Quality
Writing
Process