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Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes

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“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.”

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Book:The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
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“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.”

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Book:The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
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“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.”

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Book:The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
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“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.”

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Author:Siddhartha Mukherjee
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“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.”

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