Siddhartha Mukherjee
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Siddhartha Mukherjeeis an Indian-born American physician, scientist, and writer best known for his 2010 book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which was awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The book was the basis of a 2015 film documentary, Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies, by Ken Burns for PBS Television. It was named one of the 100 most influential books written in English since 1923 by the magazine Time and one of the 100...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionScientist
CountryIndia
fascination population medical
This was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation.
powerful feelings monsters
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
cities want littles
I left Delhi in 1989 and remember very little of how life used to be then. Increasingly, in my recent visits to Delhi, I've started to realize that the city has become intellectually very lively. It makes me want to discover the city over and over again.
cancer world
It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.
couple powerful paris
In Paris, friend of Bequerel’s, a young physicist-chemist couple named Pierre and Marie Curie, began to scour the natural world for even more powerful chemical sources of X-rays. Pierre and Marie (then Maria Sklodowska, a penniless Polish immigrant living in a garret in Paris) had met at the Sorbonne and been drawn to each other because of a common interest in magnetism.
song cancer heart
In the laboratory, we call this the six-degrees-of-separation-from-cancer rule: you can ask any biological question, no matter how seemingly distant-what makes the heart fail, or why worms age, or even how birds learn songs-and you will end up, in fewer than six genetic steps, connecting with a proto-oncogene or tumor suppressor.
cancer cells mirrors
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.
cells gardening littles
Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, 'You know, that doesn't look right'.
cancer ideas interesting
I wanted to explore cancer not just biologically, but metaphorically. The idea that tuberculosis in the 19th century possessed the same kind of frightening and decaying quality was very interesting to me, and it seemed that one could explore the idea that every age defined its own illness.
discovery serendipity today
Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.
cancer character writing
I began wondering, can one really write a biography of an illness? But I found myself thinking of cancer as this character that has lived for 4,000 years, and I wanted to know what was its birth, what is its mind, its personality, its psyche?
cancer might way
A breast cancer might turn out to have a close resemblance to a gastric cancer. And this kind of reorganization of cancer in terms of its internal genetic anatomy has really changed the way we treat and approach cancer in general.
pain cancer thinking
I think the way we think about cancer, the way we treat cancer, has dramatically changed in the last century. 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.
cancer levels firsts
I had seen cancer at a more cellular level as a researcher. The first time I entered the cancer ward, my first instinct was to withdraw from what was going on - the complexity, the death. It was a very bleak time.