Quotes by Siddhartha Mukherjee

“Emblematic of this era was the prolific Viennese surgeon Theodor Billroth. Born in 1821, Billroth studied music and surgery with almost equal verve. (The professions still often go hand in hand. Bo...”

“Intelligence...[is] not marathon rac[e]: there is no fixed criteria for success, no start or finish lines -- and running sideways or backwards, might secure victory.”

“If we define "beauty" as having blue eyes (and only blue eyes), then we will, indeed, find a "gene for beauty." If we define "intelligence" as the performance on only one kind of test, then we will...”

“Freaks become norms, and norms become extinct. Monster by monster, evolution advanced”

“Natures and features last until the grave”

“History repeats itself, in part because the genome repeats itself. And the genome repeats itself, in part because history does. The impulses, ambitions, fantasies, and desires that drive human hist...”

“If the history of the last century taught us the dangers of empowering governments to determine genetic fitness (i.e., which person fits within the triangle, and who lives outside it), then the que...”

“History repeats, but science reverberates.”

“Without equality, he argued, eugenics would degenerate into yet another mechanism by which the powerful could control the weak.”

“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 p...”

“A furious researcher stumbled out of one of the lab buildings and shouted, 'I'm a scientist working on the AIDS cure. Why are you here? You are making too much noise.' It was a statement that epito...”

“Only one person was conspicuously missing from the (American Society of Clinical Oncology, ASCO) party - Dennis Slamon. Having spent the afternoon planning the next phase of Herceptin trials with b...”

“Nothing is invented; nothing is extraneous. Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own [. . .] this is not a metaphor. Down to their innate...”

“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...”

“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 characteristi...”

“It is hard to look at the tumor and not come away with the feeling that one has encountered a powerful monster in its infancy”

“Scientists divide. We discriminate. It is the inevitable occupational hazard of our profession that we must break the world into its constituent parts -- genes, atoms, bytes -- before making it who...”

“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. So, in fact,...”

“A strong intuition is much more powerful than a weal test. Normals teach us rules; outliers teach us laws. For every perfect medical experiment, there is a perfect human bias.”

“What we do in the laboratory is we try to design drugs that will not just eradicate cancer cells but will eradicate their homes.”