Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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'. "

" Every era casts cancer in its own image. "

" 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. "

" Cancer is not one disease but many diseases. "

" 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.' "

" 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

Say

Progress

" 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. "

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

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Better

Always

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" What we do in the laboratory is we try to design drugs that will not just eradicate cancer cells but will eradicate their homes. "

" Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "