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

Siddhartha Mukherjee

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" The idea that cancer genes are sitting inside each and every one of our chromosomes, just waiting to be corrupted or inactivated and thereby unleashing cancer, is, of course, one of the seminal ideas of oncology. "

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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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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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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" 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. "

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" 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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" 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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" Every era casts cancer in its own image. "

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

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

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" 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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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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

" 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

" I am a scientist and I am a physician. So I write papers. "

Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

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" 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.' "

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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. "

Siddhartha Mukherjee

" 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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" 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. "

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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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" 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. "

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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. "

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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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" 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. "

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

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

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" 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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