Quotessence
Home / Authors / Siddhartha Mukherjee
Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes

Physician

Filter quotes by topic

AllCancerMedicineGenScienceGeneticsWritingBiologyCellsHealthIllness

Famous Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes

“Cancer, we have discovered, is stitched into our genome. Oncogenes arise from mutations in essential genes that regulate the growth of cells. Mutations accumulate in these genes when DNA is damaged by carcinogens, but also by seemingly random errors in copying genes when cells divide. The former might be preventable, but the latter is endogenous. Cancer is a flaw in our growth, but this flaw is deeply entrenched in ourselves. We can rid ourselves of cancer, then, only as much as we can rid ourselves of the processes in out physiology that depend on growth-aging, regeneration, healing, reproduction.”

LifeDeathHuman NatureEvolutionSurvivalMedicineCancerBiologyGene
Book:The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Create image

“We are chemical apes: having discovered the capacity to extract, purify, and react molecules to produce new and wondrous molecules, we have begun to spin a new chemical universe around ourselves. Our bodies our cells, our genes are thus being immersed and reimmersed in a changing flux of molecules -pesticides, pharmaceutical drugs, plastics, cosmetics, estrogens, food products, hormones, even novel forms of physical impulses, such as radiation and magnetism. Some of these, inevitably, will be carcinogenic. We cannot wish this world away; our task, the, is to sift through it vigilantly to discriminate bona fide carcinogens from innocent and useful bystanders.”

LifeDeathTechnologyHuman NatureEvolutionSurvivalMedicineCancerBiologyGene
Book:The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Create image

“But what *is* "natural"? I wonder. On one hand: variation, mutation, change, inconstancy, divisibility, flux. And on the other: constancy, permanence, indivisibility, fidelity. Bhed. Abhed. It should hardly surprise us that DNA, the molecule of contradictions, encodes an organism of contradictions. We seek constancy in heredity—and find its opposite: variation. Mutants are necessary to maintain the essence of our selves. Our genome has negotiated a fragile balance between counterpoised forces, pairing strand with opposing strand, mixing past and future, pitting memory against desire. It is the most human of all things that we possess. Its stewardship may be the ultimate test of knowledge and discernment for our species.”

HumanityNatureDiversityVariationGeneticsMutationHuman Genome
Book:The Gene: An Intimate History
Create image

“The problem with racial discrimination, though, is not the inference of a person's race from their genetic characteristics. It is quite the opposite: it is the inference of a person's characteristics from their race. The question is not, can you, given an individual's skin color, hair texture, or language, infer something about their ancestry or origin. That is a question of biological systematics -- of lineage, taxonomy, of racial geography, of biological discrimination. Of course you can -- and genomics as vastly refined that inference. You can scan any individual genome and infer rather deep insights about a person's ancestry, or place of origin. But the vastly more controversial question is the converse: Given a racial identity -- African or Asian, say -- can you infer anything about an individual's characteristics: not just skin or hair color, but more complex features, such as intelligence, habits, personality, and aptitude? /I/ Genes can certainly tell us about race, but can race tell us anything about genes? /i/ To answer this question, we need to measure how genetic variation is distributed across various racial categories. Is there more diversity _within_ races or _between_ races? Does knowing that someone is of African versus European descent, say, allow us to refine our understanding of their genetic traits, or their personal, physical, or intellectual attributes in a meaningful manner? Or is there so much variation within Africans and Europeans that _intraracial_ diversity dominates the comparison, thereby making the category "African" or "European" moot? We now know precise and quantitative answers to these questions. A number of studies have tried to quantify the level of genetic diversity of the human genome. The most recent estimates suggest that the vast proportion of genetic diversity (85 to 90 percent) occurs _within_ so-called races (i.e., within Asians or Africans) and only a minor proportion (7 percent) within racial groups (the geneticist Richard Lewontin had estimated a similar distribution as early as 1972). Some genes certainly vary sharply between racial or ethnic groups -- sickle-cell anemia is an Afro-Caribbean and Indian disease, and Tay-Sachs disease has a much higher frequency in Ashkenazi Jews -- but for the most part, the genetic diversity within any racial group dominates the diversity between racial groups -- not marginally, but by an enormous amount. The degree of interracial variability makes "race" a poor surrogate for nearly any feature: in a genetic sense, an African man from Nigria is so "different" from another man from Namibia that it makes little sense to lump them into the same category.”

RaceEvolutionDiversityRacismGenesAnthropologyGenetics
Book:The Gene: An Intimate History
Create image

“A friend told me the story of visiting a Tibetan doctor who specialized in pulses. The doctor asked him a few perfunctory questions and then checked his pulse. "You've gone through a terrible breakup," the doctor said. "Your life isn't going to be the same again." The Tibetan doctor was right: something about the pulse -- its rapidity or dullness -- had provided a clue about the longing and belonging. My friend's breakup, and life, had forever been uprooted.”

LoveHeartBreakupBiologyBreakups
Book:The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
Create image

“It was easy to repossess imagination with false promises; much harder to do so with nuanced truths. It demanded an act of exquisite measuring and remeasuring, filling and unfilling a psychological respirator with oxygen. Too much "repossession" and imagination might bloat into delusion. Too little and it might asphyxiate hope altogether.”

LifeHealthMedicineOutcomesOutlook
Book:The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Create image

“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 interdisciplinary team of genetic counselors, neurologists, orthopedic surgeons, nurses, and psychiatrists trained to focus on specific disabilities of persons with short stature. Surgical interventions were reserved to correct specific deformities as they arose. The goal was not to restore "normalcy"-but vitality, joy, and function. McKusic had rediscovered the founding principles of modern genetics in the realm of human pathology. In humans as in wild flies, genetic variations abounded. Here too genetic variants, environments, and gene-environment interactions ultimately collaborated to cause phenotypes-except in this case, the "phenotype" in question was disease. Here too some genes had partial penetrance and widely variable expressivity. One gene could cause many diseases, and one disease could be caused by many genes. And here too "fitness" could not be judged in absolutes. Rather the lack of fitness-illness [italicized, sic] in colloquial terms- was defined by the relative mismatch between an organism and environment.”

HealthMedicineIllnessFitnessParadigmFrame Of ReferenceChanging PerspectiveModern Genetics
Book:The Gene: An Intimate History
Create image

“Vogelstein’s challenge was that of the landscape artist: How does one convey the gestalt of a territory (in this case, the “territory” of a genome) in a few broad strokes of a brush? How can a picture describe the essence of a place?Vogelstein’s answer to these questions borrows beautifully from an insight long familiar to classical landscape artists: negative space can be used to convey expanse, while positive space conveys detail. To view the landscape of the cancer genome panoramically, Vogelstein splayed out the entire human genome as if it were a piece of thread zigzagging across a square sheet of paper. (Science keeps eddying into its past: the word mitosis -- Greek for "thread" -- is resonant herw again.)”

MetaphorLandscape PaintingCancer GenomeMitosis
Book:The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Create image

“Ants have a powerful caste system. A colony typically contains ants that carry out radically different roles and have markedly different body structures and behaviors. These roles, Reinberg learned, are often determined not by genes but by signals from the physical and social environment. 'Sibling ants, in their larval stage, become segregated into the different types based on environmental signals,' he said. 'Their genomes are nearly identical, but the way the genes are used—turned on or off, and kept on or off—must determine what an ant "becomes." It seemed like a perfect system to study epigenetics. And so Shelley and I caught a flight to Arizona to see Jürgen Liebig, the ant biologist, in his lab.' The collaboration between Reinberg, Berger, and Liebig has been explosively successful—the sort of scientific story ('two epigeneticists walk into a bar and meet an entomologist') that works its way into a legend. Carpenter ants, one of the species studied by the team, have elaborate social structures, with queens (bullet-size, fertile, winged), majors (bean-size soldiers who guard the colony but rarely leave it), and minors (nimble, grain-size, perpetually moving foragers). In a recent, revelatory study, researchers in Berger’s lab injected a single dose of a histone-altering chemical into the brains of major ants. Remarkably, their identities changed; caste was recast. The major ants wandered away from the colony and began to forage for food. The guards turned into scouts. Yet the caste switch could occur only if the chemical was injected during a vulnerable period in the ants’ development. [...] The impact of the histone-altering experiment sank in as I left Reinberg’s lab and dodged into the subway. [...] All of an ant’s possible selves are inscribed in its genome. Epigenetic signals conceal some of these selves and reveal others, coiling some, uncoiling others. The ant chooses a life between its genes and its epigenes—inhabiting one self among its incipient selves.”

ScienceNatureBiologyNurtureDnaGeneticsEye OpeningSad TruthNature Vs NurtureEpigenetics
Author:Siddhartha Mukherjee
Create image

“In the folklore of science, there is the often-told story of the moment of discovery: the quickening of the pulse, the spectral luminosity of ordinary facts, the overheated, standstill second when observations crystallize and fall together into patterns, like pieces of a kaleidoscope. The apple drops from the tree. The man jumps up from a bathtub; the slippery equation balances itself. But there is another moment of discovery—its antithesis—that is rarely recorded: the discovery of failure. It is a moment that a scientist often encounters alone. A patient’s CT scan shows a relapsed lymphoma. A cell once killed by a drug begins to grow back. A child returns to the NCI with a headache.”

AntithesisEureka Moments
Author:Siddhartha Mukherjee
Create image

“The desire to categorize humans along racial lines, and the impulse to superpose attributes such as intelligence (or criminality, creativity, or violence) on those lines, illustrates a general theme concerning genetics and categorization. Like the English novel, or the face, say, the human genome can be lumped and split in a million different ways. But whether to split or lump, to categorize or synthesize, is a choice. ... The narrower the definition of the heritable feature or the trait, the more likely we will find a genetic locus for that trait, and the more likely we will find that the trait will segregate within some human sub-population.”

CategorizationCategorisationGenetic DeterminismRacial Categorisation
Book:The Gene: An Intimate History
Create image

“The landscape of carcinogens is not static either. We are chemical apes: having discovered the capacity to extract, purify, and react molecules to produce new and wondrous molecules, we have begun to spin a new chemical universe around ourselves. Our bodies, our cells, our genes are thus being immersed and reimmersed in a changing flux of molecules--pesticides, pharmaceutical drugs, plastics, cosmetics, estrogens, food products, hormones, even novel forms of physical impulses, such as radiation and magnetism. Some of these, inevitably, will be carcinogenic. We cannot wish this world away; our task, then, is to sift through it vigilantly to discriminate bona fide carcinogens from innocent and useful bystanders.”

Carcinogen
Book:The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Create image

“As with Dalton and the atom, neither Bateson nor Johannsen had any understanding of what a gene was. They could not fathom its material form, its physical or chemical structure, its location within the body or inside the cell, or even its mechanism of action. The word was created to mark a function; it was an abstraction. A gene was defined by what a gene does: it was a carrier of hereditary information. “Language is not only our servant,” Johannsen wrote, “[but] it may also be our master. It is desirable to create new terminology in all cases where new and revised conceptions are being developed. Therefore, I have proposed the word ‘gene.’ The ‘gene’ is nothing but a very applicable little word. It may be useful as an expression for the ‘unit factors’ . . . demonstrated by modern Mendelian researchers.” “The word ‘gene’ is completely free of any hypothesis,” Johannsen remarked. “It expresses only the evident fact that . . . many characteristics of the organism are specified . . . in unique, separate and thereby independent ways.”

TerminologyNomenclatureThe GeneScientific Language
Book:The Gene: An Intimate History
Create image

“Death (or at least the social meaning of death) could be counted and recounted with other gauges, often resulting in vastly different conclusions. The appraisal of diseases depends, Breslow argued, on our self-appraisal. Society and illness often encounter each other in parallel mirrors, each holding up a Rorschach test for the other.”

SocietyMedicineIllnessSelf Appraisal
Book:The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Create image

“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 because this was a generation inherently haunted by its sexuality and freedom; SARS set off a panic about global spread and contagion at a time when globalism and social contagion were issues simmering nervously in the West. Every era casts illness in its own image. Society, like the ultimate psychosomatic patient, matches its medical afflictions to its psychological crises; when a disease touches such a visceral chord, it is often because that chord is already resonating.”

CancerAidsSarsPsychosomaticMedical Anthropology
Book:The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Create image

“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 pests, become pests in their own right; the raising of smokestacks, meant to alleviate urban pollution, releases particulate effluents higher in the air and exacerbates pollution; stimulating blood formation, meant to prevent heart attacks, thickens the blood and results in an increased risk of blood clots in the heart. But when nonscientists overestimate [italicized, sic] complexity- 'No one can possibly crack this [italicized, sic] code" - they fall into the trap of unanticipated consequences. In the early 1950s , a common trope among some biologists was that the genetic code would be so context dependent- so utterly determined by a particular cell in a particular organism and so horribly convoluted- that deciphering it would be impossible. The truth turned out to be quite the opposite: just one molecule carries the code, and just one code pervades the biological world. If we know the code, we can intentionally alter it in organisms, and ultimately in humans. Similarly, in the 1960s, many doubted that gene-cloning technologies could so easily shuttle genes between species. by 1980, making a mammalian protein in a bacterial cell, or a bacterial protein in a mammalian cell, was not just feasible, it was in Berg's words, rather "ridiculously simple." Species were specious. "Being natural" was often "just a pose.”

InspirationalTechnologyBalanceGeneticsGenomicsDouble Edged SwordModern Genetics
Book:The Gene: An Intimate History
Create image

“...los lectores de la India y China quizá reconozcan, con cierta vergüenza y seriedad, que el mayor proyecto de -eugenesia negativa- de la historia de la humanidad no fue el del exterminio sistemático de los judíos en Alemania y Austria concebido en los años 30. Esta espantosa distinción la tienen India y China, donde faltan más de diez millones de mujeres debido al infanticidio, el aborto y el abandono de niñas.”

EugenesiaFeminicideFeminicidioNegativa
Book:The Gene: An Intimate History
Create image

“Biyolojide eskiden beri işlenegelen bir günah, özelliğin tanımıyla özelliğin kendisini birbirine karıştırmaktır. Örneğin ''güzellik'' tanımını mavi gözlü olma diye yaparsak, o zaman tabi ki de ''güzellik geni''ni bulabiliriz. ''Zeka''yı sırf belli bir testteki, sırf belli bir tip problemi çözme performansı olarak tanımlarsak, o zaman tabi ki ''zeka geni'' bulabiliriz. Genom kendi kurgularımızın genişliğinin veya darlığının bir aynasıdır yalnızca; Narkissos'un suda yansıyan yüzü.”

GüzellikZeka
Book:The Gene: An Intimate History
Create image

“Bannister's mile remains a touchstone in the history of athletics not because Bannister set an unbreachable record - currently, the fastest mile is a good fifteen seconds under Bannister's. For generations, four minutes was thought to represent an intrinsic physiological limit, as if muscles could inherently not be made to move any faster or lungs breathe any deeper. What Bannister proved was that such notions about intrinsic boundaries are mythical. What he broke permanently was not a limit, but the idea of limits.”

LimitsAnalogyRoger BannisterBannister S MileFour Minute MileIntrinsic Boundaries
Book:The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Create image

“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 organize chemicals into compartments; we sort laundry on Wednesdays. "It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe," James Gleick wrote. We live in the loopholes of natural laws, seeking extensions, exceptions and excuses. The laws of nature still mark the outer boundaries of permissibility - but life, in all its idiosyncratic, mad weirdness, flourishes by reading between the lines.”

LifeThe UniverseThe Gene
Book:The Gene: An Intimate History
Create image

“Most notably, perhaps, children with Down syndrome have an extraordinary sweetness of temperament, as if in inheriting an extra chromosome they had acquired a concomitant loss of cruelty and malice (if there is any doubt that genotypes can influence temperament or personality, then a single encounter with a Down child can lay that idea to rest).”

ScienceMedicineGeneticsDown SyndromeThe Gene
Book:The Gene: An Intimate History
Create image

“Griffith, verilerini 'Journal of Hygiene' diye adını kimsenin duymamışlığı konusunda Mendel'i bile kıskandıracak bir dergide yayımladı. Süklüm püklüm bir tonla yazan Griffith, sanki genetik bilimi köklerinden sarstığı için özür diler gibiydi. Çalışmasında transformasyondan mikrobiyolojideki hoş bir ilginçlik gibi bahsediyor, ama kalıtımın kimyasal temelini keşfetmiş olabileceğine hiç değinmiyordu. Son on yılın en önemli biyokimya makalesinin en önemli sonucu, ağır metin yığının altında nazik bir öksürük gibi boğulup gitti.”

GenTransformasyon
Book:The Gene: An Intimate History
Create image

“Genetik kod basittir: DNA'dan RNA inşa edilir, RNA'dan da protein inşa edilir. DNA'daki her baz üçlüsü, proteinde bir aminoasidi belirler. Oysa genomik kod karmaşıktır: Genin üzerinde, genin ne zaman ve nerede ifade edileceği ile ilgili bilgileri barındıran DNA parçaları vardır: Genlerin genom üzerindeki yerlerinin neye göre belirlenmiş olduğunu da bilmiyoruz. Genler arasındaki DNA bölgelerinin gen fizyolojisini nasıl düzenlediğini ve koordine ettiğini de bilmiyoruz. Dağların ötesinde dağların olması gibi, kodların ötesinde de kodlar vardır.”

GenGenom
Book:The Gene: An Intimate History
Create image

“Artık biliyoruz ki hücrelerin içinde viral genleri tanıyıp etkileşmelerini engelleyen kadim algılayıcıları var. Bu algılayıcılar viral geni saptadıktan sonra üstüne kimyasal işaretlerle ''kullanılmaz'' damgasını vuruyorlar. Demek ki genom kendini değiştirme işlemlerine uslu uslu boyun eğmiyordu. Sihirbazlar arasında eski bir söz vardır: Bir şeyi yok etmeyi öğrenmeden önce geri getirmeyi öğrensen iyi olur. Gen terapistleri bu dersi yeni baştan öğreniyorlardı. Bir geni hücrenin içine çaktırmadan yerleştirmek kolaydır. Asıl zorluk onu tekrar görünür kılmaktı.”

GenGenom
Book:The Gene: An Intimate History
Create image

“1980'lerden bu yana neredeyse otuz yıl boyunca, psikologlar ve genetikçiler aynı koşullarda büyütülmüş özdeş ikizlerin nasıl ıraksak gelişim yazgıları izlediklerini açıklayabilecek ince farkları belgelemeye ve ölçmeye çalıştılar. Fakat somut, ölçülebilir, sistematik farkları bulmak için yapılan tüm girişimler başarısız oldu: İkizler aynı ailede büyümelerine, aynı evde yaşamalarına, genelde aynı okula gitmelerine, neredeyse aynı yemekleri yemelerine, çoğu zaman aynı kitapları okumalarına, aynı arkadaş çevrelerine sahip olmalarına ve aynı kültürden beslenmelerine rağmen nasıl oluyorsa bariz biçimde birbirinden farklı oluyorlardı. Bu fark nereden kaynaklanıyordu? 20 yıl içinde yapılan 43 çalışma sonunda güçlü ve tutarlı bir yanıta ulaşıldı: ''sistematik olmayan, kendine özgü, tesadüfi olaylar''. Hastalıklar. Kazalar. Travmalar. Tetikleyiciler. Kaçırılmış bir tren; kayıp bir anahtar; kafayı kurcalayan bir düşünce. Moleküllerdeki oynamalar sonucu genlerde meydana gelen oynamalar; genlerdeki oynamalar sonucu biçimde meydana gelen oynamalar. Venedik'te bir kavisi dönerken kanala düşüp suya kapılmak. Aşka kapılmak. Hayatın tesadüfleri. Şans. Bu yanıt çileden çıkarıcı değil mi biraz? Onlarca yıllık araştırmaların ardından yazgıyı ortaya çıkaran şeyin sonuçta ... yazgı olduğunu mu söyleyeceğiz? Canlıları oldukları gibi yapan şey ... öyle olmalarıdır mı diyeceğiz? Bu formülasyonda çok aydınlatıcı bir güzellik var bence.”

GenIkiz çAlışmaları
Book:The Gene: An Intimate History
Create image

“Genler içinde bulundukları çevrelere programlanmış tepkiler gösterirler - yoksa korunan bir biçim olmazdı. Fakat aynı zamanda şansın kendine özgü kaprislerinin yapışması için de pay bırakırlar. Bu etkileşime ''yazgı'' diyoruz; kendimizin buna verdiği tepkimelere de ''seçim''. Konuşma yetisine sahip iki ayaklı ve dik yürüyen bir organizma, işte bu şekilde bir plan dahilinde, ama aynı zamanda planın dışına çıkmak üzere inşa edilir. Böyle bir organizmanın tek bir eşsiz varyantına ''birey'' deriz.”

GenSeçimYazgı
Book:The Gene: An Intimate History
Create image

“The reasons for this paring back of synapses is a mystery, but synaptic pruning is thought to sharpen and reinforce the "correct" synapses, while removing the weak and unnecessary ones. "It reinforces an old intuition," a psychiatrist in Boston told me. "The secret of learning is the systematic elimination of excess. We grow, mostly, by dying.”

ScienceGrowthLearningBiology
Book:The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
Create image