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“History repeats, but science reverberates.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“The art of medicine is long, Hippocrates tells us, "and life is short; opportunity fleeting; the experiment perilous; judgment flawed.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance's link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety - one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Freaks become norms, and norms become extinct. Monster by monster, evolution advanced”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“In God we trust. All others [must] have data. - Bernard Fisher”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing. —Voltaire”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Normalcy is the antithesis of evolution.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“But the story of leukemia--the story of cancer--isn't the story of doctors who struggle and survive, moving from institution to another. It is the story of patients who struggle and survive, moving from on embankment of illness to another. Resilience, inventiveness, and survivorship--qualities often ascribed to great physicians--are reflected qualities, emanating first from those who struggle with illness and only then mirrored by those who treat them. If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Memories sharpen the past; it is reality that decays.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“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, indeed, find a "gene for intelligence." The genome is only a mirror for the breadth or narrowness of human imagination.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“Like musicians, like mathematicians—like elite athletes—scientists peak early and dwindle fast. It isn’t creativity that fades, but stamina: science is an endurance sport. To produce that single illuminating experiment, a thousand nonilluminating experiments have to be sent into the trash; it is battle between nature and nerve. Avery”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“Seek simplicity, but distrust it,�� Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician and philosopher, once advised his students. Dobzhansky”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“The point is this: if you cannot separate the phenotype of mental illness from creative impulses, then you cannot separate the genotype of mental illness and creative impulse.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“In 2005, a man diagnosed with multiple myeloma asked me if he would be alive to watch his daughter graduate from high school in a few months. In 2009, bound to a wheelchair, he watched his daughter graduate from college. The wheelchair had nothing to do with his cancer. The man had fallen down while coaching his youngest son's baseball team.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Three profoundly destabilizing scientific ideas ricochet through the twentieth century, trisecting it into three unequal parts: the atom, the byte, the gene.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“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 history are, at least in part, encoded in the human genome. And human history has, in turn, selected genomes that carry these impulses, ambitions, fantasies, and desires. This self-fulfilling circle of logic is responsible for some of the most magnificent and evocative qualities in our species, but also some of the most reprehensible. It is far too much to ask ourselves to escape the orbit of this logic, but recognizing its inherent circularity, and being skeptical of its overreach, might protect the week from the will of the strong, and the 'mutant' from being annihilated by the 'normal'.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“A model is a lie that helps you see the truth.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“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.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“Our ability to read out this sequence of our own genome has the makings of a philosophical paradox. Can an intelligent being comprehend the instructions to make itself? —John Sulston Scholars”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“It is tempting to write the history of technology through products: the wheel; the microscope; the airplane; the Internet. But it is more illuminating to write the history of technology through transitions: linear motion to circular motion; visual space to subvisual space; motion on land to motion on air; physical connectivity to virtual connectivity.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Cancer is an expansionist disease; it invades through tissues, sets up colonies in hostile landscapes, seeking “sanctuary�� in one organ and then immigrating to another. It lives desperately, inventively, fiercely, territorially, cannily, and defensively—at times, as if teaching us how to survive. To confront cancer is to encounter a parallel species, one perhaps more adapted to survival than even we are.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“One swallow is a coincidence, but two swallows make summer.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“This was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Cancer, perhaps, is an ultimate perversion of genetics—a genome that becomes pathologically obsessed with replicating itself. The”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“All cancers are alike but they are alike in a unique way.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Modesty is a virtue,�� he would later write, “yet one gets further without it.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“Consider the genesis of a single-celled embryo produced by the fertilization of an egg by a sperm. The genetic material of this embryo comes from two sources: paternal genes (from sperm) and maternal genes (from eggs). But the cellular material of the embryo comes exclusively from the egg; the sperm is no more than a glorified delivery vehicle for male DNA—a genome equipped with a hyperactive tail. Aside from proteins, ribosomes, nutrients, and membranes, the egg also supplies the embryo with specialized structures called mitochondria. These mitochondria are the energy-producing factories of the cell; they are so anatomically discrete and so specialized in their function that cell biologists call them “organelles”—i.e., mini-organs resident within cells. Mitochondria, recall, carry a small, independent genome that resides within the mitochondrion itself—not in the cell’s nucleus, where the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes (and the 21,000-odd human genes) can be found. The exclusively female origin of all the mitochondria in an embryo has an important consequence. All humans—male or female—must have inherited their mitochondria from their mothers, who inherited their mitochondria from their mothers, and so forth, in an unbroken line of female ancestry stretching indefinitely into the past. (A woman also carries the mitochondrial genomes of all her future descendants in her cells; ironically, if there is such a thing as a “homunculus,�� then it is exclusively female in origin—technically, a “femunculus��?) Now imagine an ancient tribe of two hundred women, each of whom bears one child. If the child happens to be a daughter, the woman dutifully passes her mitochondria to the next generation, and, through her daughter’s daughter, to a third generation. But if she has only a son and no daughter, the woman’s mitochondrial lineage wanders into a genetic blind alley and becomes extinct (since sperm do not pass their mitochondria to the embryo, sons cannot pass their mitochondrial genomes to their children). Over the course of the tribe’s evolution, tens of thousands of such mitochondrial lineages will land on lineal dead ends by chance, and be snuffed out. And here is the crux: if the founding population of a species is small enough, and if enough time has passed, the number of surviving maternal lineages will keep shrinking, and shrinking further, until only a few are left. If half of the two hundred women in our tribe have sons, and only sons, then one hundred mitochondrial lineages will dash against the glass pane of male-only heredity and vanish in the next generation. Another half will dead-end into male children in the second generation, and so forth. By the end of several generations, all the descendants of the tribe, male or female, might track their mitochondrial ancestry to just a few women. For modern humans, that number has reached one: each of us can trace our mitochondrial lineage to a single human female who existed in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago. She is the common mother of our species. We do not know what she looked like, although her closest modern-day relatives are women of the San tribe from Botswana or Namibia. I find the idea of such a founding mother endlessly mesmerizing. In human genetics, she is known by a beautiful name—Mitochondrial Eve.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History