“ What we do in the laboratory is we try to design drugs that will not just eradicate cancer cells but will eradicate their homes. Siddhartha Mukherjee
“ It is hard to look at the tumor and not come away with the feeling that one has encountered a powerful monster in its infancy Siddhartha Mukherjee
“ The universe seeks equilibriums; it prefers to disperse energy, disrupt organization, and maximize chaos. Life is designed to combat these forces. We slow down reactions, concentrate matter, and organ… Siddhartha Mukherjee
“ 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'. Siddhartha Mukherjee
“ The cure of even one solid cancer in adults, Farber knew, would singularly revolutionize oncology. It would provide the most concrete proof that this was a winnable war. 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
“ In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice that the world keeps shifting so quickly under her feet that she has to keep running just to keep her position. This is our pred… Siddhartha Mukherjee
“ 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, th… Siddhartha Mukherjee
“ 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 negat… Siddhartha Mukherjee
“ Technology, I said before, is most powerful when it enables transitions—between linear and circular motion (the wheel), or between real and virtual space (the Internet). Science, in contrast, is most… Siddhartha Mukherjee
“ In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practice it much. —Sherlock Holmes, i… 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
“ When scientists underestimate complexity, they fall prey to the perils of unintended consequences. The parables of such scientific overreach are well-known: foreign animals, introduced to control pest… Siddhartha Mukherjee
“ McKusick's belief in this paradigm-the focus on disability rather than abnormalcy-was actualized in the treatment of patients in his clinic. Patients with dwarfism, for instance, were treated by an in… Siddhartha Mukherjee
“ In an essay titled A View From the Front Line, Jencks described her experience with cancer as like being woken up midflight on a jumbo jet and then thrown out with a parachute into a foreign landscape… Siddhartha Mukherjee
“ And this was to save rats, right? Or mice? You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors? Siddhartha Mukherjee
“ When a disease insinuates itself so potently into the imagination of an era, it is often because it impinges on an anxiety latent within that imagination. AIDS loomed so large on the 1980s in part bec… Siddhartha Mukherjee
“ Labs, too, can become machines. In science, it is more often a pejorative description than a complimentary one: an efficient, thrumming, technically accomplished laboratory is like a robot orchestra t… Siddhartha Mukherjee
