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

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

Siddhartha Mukherjee

physicians self doubt

History repeats, but science reverberates.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

repeating-history repeats

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

paris couple powerful

I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

writing firsts thinking

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

hysteria cancer media

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

cancer cells mirrors

All cancers are alike but they are alike in a unique way.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

cancer unique way

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

Siddhartha Mukherjee

cancer connections moving

Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos

Siddhartha Mukherjee

chaos cancer organized

If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

heroism doctors medicine

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

cancer pain thinking

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

Siddhartha Mukherjee

pharmacology mind needs

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

cancer writing character

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.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

cancer discovery years

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

cancer diversity challenges

It felt—nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos—that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

cancer twenties years

A positive attitude does not cure cancer, any more than a negative one causes it.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

cancer pain attitude

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

stress trying thinking

One swallow is a coincidence, but two swallows make summer.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

coincidence summer two

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 writing ideas