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" Cancer is not one disease but many diseases. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Diseases
Disease
Cancer
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" Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery. "
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" If something is good, more is not necessarily better. Not always. "
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" 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. "
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" I once set myself a deadline: half a chapter a week, 20 minutes a day. The thought froze me instantly, like literary Botox. I returned to my non-schedule: sleeping, writing 20 minutes, and then back to sleep. Breakfast in bed, with juice congealing on the sill: pages and pages began to pour out again. "
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Breakfast
" 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. "
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" Postwar U.S. was the world's leader in science and technology. The investment in science research was staggering. "
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" Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients. "
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Over
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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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Young
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" I am a scientist and I am a physician. So I write papers. "
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" 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. "
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" Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching. "
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Today
" Most days, I go home and I feel rejuvenated. I feel ebullient. "
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Feel
" 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. "
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Medicine
Doctor
Victory
" 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
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Grow
" 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
" 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. "
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Deep
Diversity
God
" 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
" 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. "
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" I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Think
Rule
First
" 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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Test
Medical
Perfect
" 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. "
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" 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
" There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression. "
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Depression
Moving
Cancer
" 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.' "
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Disease
Vision
Way
" 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. "
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Cancer
Big
Difference
" 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
" 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. "
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Way
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Breast Cancer
" Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Prepared
Mind
You
" 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? "
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Personality
Myself
Mind
" 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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