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" 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

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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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Siddhartha Mukherjee

" 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

" Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery. "

Siddhartha Mukherjee

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" Postwar U.S. was the world's leader in science and technology. The investment in science research was staggering. "

Siddhartha Mukherjee

" 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. "

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.' "

Siddhartha Mukherjee

" 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. "

Siddhartha Mukherjee

" Cancer is not one disease but many diseases. "

Siddhartha Mukherjee

" 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. "

Siddhartha Mukherjee

" 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. "

Siddhartha Mukherjee

" 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. "

Siddhartha Mukherjee

" Most days, I go home and I feel rejuvenated. I feel ebullient. "

Siddhartha Mukherjee

" 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. "

Siddhartha Mukherjee

" Every era casts cancer in its own image. "

Siddhartha Mukherjee

" 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

" 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

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

Siddhartha Mukherjee

" 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

" 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

" 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