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" Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Searching
Serendipity
Today
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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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" 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. "
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" Cancer is not one disease but many diseases. "
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" Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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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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" 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
" 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. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Memory
Relationship
Reading
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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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Disease
Just
System
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
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Life
Me
Realize
" 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
" 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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Inside
Cancer
Ideas
" When you immerse yourself in medicine you realise that hope is not absolute. It's not that simple. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Hope
Yourself
You
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Sleep
Day
Breakfast
" 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
Treat
Breast Cancer
" 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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Now
Young
Cancer
" 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
" What we do in the laboratory is we try to design drugs that will not just eradicate cancer cells but will eradicate their homes. "
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Will
Cancer
Cells
" 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
" If something is good, more is not necessarily better. Not always. "
Siddhartha Mukherjee
More
Better
Always
" 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