Quotes from Siddhartha Mukherjee

Most days, I go home and I feel rejuvenated. I feel ebullient.

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.

Good physicians are rarely dispassionate. They agonize and self-doubt over patients.

We may have to learn to live with cancer rather than die of it. It means a big change in our mindset and how we do research. We haven't quite reached there yet.

When you immerse yourself in medicine you realise that hope is not absolute. It's not that simple.

There is a duality in recognising what an incredible disease it is - in terms of its origin, that it emerges out of a normal cell. It's a reminder of what a wonderful thing a normal cell is. In a very cold, scientific sense, I think a cancer cell is a kind of biological marvel.

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?

Why did I write 'The Emperor of All Maladies?' A 56-year-old woman with an abdominal sarcoma, having undergone two remissions and a relapse, asked me to describe what she was battling. By the time I had finished answering her, I realised that I had written 600 pages.

Science is among the most profoundly human of our activities. Far from being subsumed by the dehumanising effects of technology, science, in fact, remains our last stand against it.

Cancer is not just a dividing cell. It's a complex disease: It invades, it metastasizes, it evades the immune system.

The history is important because science is a discipline deeply immersed in history. In other words, every time you perform an experiment in science or in medicine, what you're actually doing is you're answering someone, answering a question raised by someone in the past.

I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read.

Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery.

The trick to my writing, it turned out, was doing so exclusively in bed. The minute I even dared to discipline myself and write at the desk, I produced mounds of nonsense. Yet, sitting in bed, I wrote easily, effortlessly, fluidly. I became the master of perfect indiscipline.

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'.

What does it mean to be an oncologist? It means that you get to sit in at a moment of another person's life that is so hyper-acute, and not just because they're medically ill. It's also a moment of hope and expectation and concern.

My memory of my household is of one immersed in books and music. I have a very intimate relationship with Bengali literature, particularly Tagore, and my interest besides reading then was music.

Sidney Farber was a pathologist. He was called a doctor of the dead. He was a pathologist who sort of lived in the basement of the children's hospital in Boston, and he became very interested in childhood leukemia. And Farber began to inject this drug, aminopterin, into young kids, in order to see if he could get a remission.

Robert Sandler is a child who died when he was three years old, and he is a child who was the first child that we know of to be treated with chemotherapy.

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, the gamut of medical intervention is enormous.

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.

There's a rising cancer trend and, as I said, one of the major contributors is the overall ageing of the population - we aren't dying of other things, so we're dying of cancer.

Each of us knows a few or several young people whose lives have been devastated by cancer. I don't mean to be nihilistic about it, but it is very much an active killer of people now.

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