Quotes by Siddhartha Mukherjee - Page 2

What does it mean to be an oncologist? It means that you get to sit in at a moment of another person's life that is so hyper-acute, and not just because they're medically ill. It's also a moment of hope and expectation and concern.
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Concern
Ill
Expectation
Medically
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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Positive
Attitude
Cancer
Causes
Chemotherapy
Mental Attitude
Negative
Positive Attitude
Radiation
Spiritual
Surgery
Attitude Positive Negative
Cure
Help
Mental
Sense
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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?
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Cancer
Character
Illness
Writing
Biography
Psyche
Wondering
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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Medical
Enormous
Providing
Relief
Solace
Curing
Options
Patients
Physician
Psychic
Treating
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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Deny
Doctors
Grief
Grieving
Medicine
Curing
Trap
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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Disease
Enormous
Leukemia
Spectrum
Big Difference
Forms
Cancers
Highly
Incurable
Whereas
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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 / Physician
Cities
Delhi
Littles
Lively
Want
Life Me City
Discover
Life City Me
Increasingly
Intellectually
Recent
Visits
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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 / Physician
Disease
Embarrassment
Fabric
Oxygen
Physiology
Severe
Spun
Thesis
False
Lung
Prescribed
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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 / Physician
Cancer
Conquer
Entrepreneur
Legendary
Mary
Special
Support
Became
Interested
Cause
Diseases
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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 / Physician
Emperor
Pages
Realised
Relapse
Time Me Woman
Answering
Battling
By The Time
Describe
Undergone
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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Discipline
Medicine
Answering
Time History Science
Experiment
Science Time History
Immersed
In Other Words
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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Cells
Embryos
Genes
Turns
Bodies
Brains
Distort
Functions
In Other Words
Unleash
Vital
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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Genes
Organizational
Principles
Systematic
Oh God
Samples
Types
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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Discipline
Nonsense
Dared
Desk
Effortlessly
Master
Trick
Minute
Produced
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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 / Physician
Genes
Caused
Link
Mutations
Unleash
Via
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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 / Physician
Cancer
Cells
Cold
Disease
Duality
Thinking
Biological
Cell
Emerges
Marvel
Origin
Reminder
Scientific
Wonderful Thing
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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Cancer
Defined
Frightening
Ideas
Illness
Interesting
Possessed
Tuberculosis
Biologically
Decaying
Explore
Seemed
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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Cancer
Enormous
Pain
Providing
Relief
Solace
Thinking
Curing
Dramatically
Last Century
Options
Patients
Physician
Psychic
Treating
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Sandeep Jauhar’s Doctored is a passionate and necessary book that asks difficult questions about the future of medicine. The narrative is gripping, and the writing is marvelous. But it was the gravity of the problem—so movingly told—that grabbed and kept my attention throughout this remarkable work.
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Book
Difficult Questions
Writing
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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Botox
Breakfast
Deadline
Juice
Pages
Myself Me Day
Chapter
Literary
Instantly
Pour
Returned
Sleeping
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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.
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Boston
Childhood
Leukemia
Remission
Basement
Began
Doctor
Dead
Hospital
Young Kids
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Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. Susan Sontag warned against overburdening an illness with metaphors. But this is not a metaphor. Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Cancer
Cells
Mirrors
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In the laboratory, we call this the six-degrees-of-separation-from-cancer rule: you can ask any biological question, no matter how seemingly distant-what makes the heart fail, or why worms age, or even how birds learn songs-and you will end up, in fewer than six genetic steps, connecting with a proto-oncogene or tumor suppressor.
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Cancer
Heart
Song
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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 / Physician
Attacking
Enormous
Grandiose
Human Species
Institute
Species
Billion
Fundamental
Poured
Runs
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In 2005, a man diagnosed with multiple myeloma asked me if he would be alive to watch his daughter graduate from high school in a few months. In 2009, bound to a wheelchair, he watched his daughter graduate from college. The wheelchair had nothing to do with his cancer. The man had fallen down while coaching his youngest son's baseball team.
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Daughter
Baseball
Cancer
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In Paris, friend of Bequerel’s, a young physicist-chemist couple named Pierre and Marie Curie, began to scour the natural world for even more powerful chemical sources of X-rays. Pierre and Marie (then Maria Sklodowska, a penniless Polish immigrant living in a garret in Paris) had met at the Sorbonne and been drawn to each other because of a common interest in magnetism.
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Couple
Paris
Powerful
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It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance's link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety - one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars.
Siddhartha Mukherjee / Physician
Cancer
Hysteria
Media
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Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes - Page 2

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