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Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes

Physician

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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.”

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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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“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.”

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

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Book:The Gene: An Intimate History
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