Quotessence
Home / Authors / Siddhartha Mukherjee
Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes

Physician

Filter quotes by topic

AllCancerMedicineGenScienceGeneticsWritingBiologyCellsHealthIllnessThinkingKindLifeMedicalSurvivalAgeBigsDeathDiscoveryDisease

Famous Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes

“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

“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

“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.”

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