The Emperor of All Maladies Quotes

“In some nations, cancer will surpass heart disease to become the most common cause of death.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“The trial designed to bring the most rigorous statistical analysis to the cause of lung cancer barely required elementary mathematics to prove its point.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Wöhler’s experiment demolished vitalism. Organic and inorganic chemicals, he proved, were interchangeable. Biology was chemistry: perhaps even a human body was no different from a bag of busily reacting chemicals—a beaker with arms, legs, eyes, brain, and soul.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Ars longa, vita brevis.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“In God we trust,”509 he brusquely told a journalist. “All others [must] have data.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“The chances in some cases are infinitesimal, but the potential is still there. This is about all that patients need to know and it is about all that patients want to know.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“The smiling oncologist does not know whether his patients vomit or not.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“This strategy—which cost Min Chiu Li his job—resulted in the first chemotherapeutic cure of cancer in adults.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“Should I refuse my dinner302 because I don’t understand the digestive system?”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“In science, ideology tends to corrupt; absolute ideology, [corrupts] absolutely. —Robert Nisbet”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“The job’s most inventive academic perk, perhaps, was his new title: the Curator of the Museum and the Inspector of the Dead.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Like so many doctors,” Rieff recalls, “he spoke to us as if we were children but without the care that a sensible adult takes in choosing what words to use with a child.” The sheer inflexibility of that approach”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“We hung our heads, ashamed. It was, I suspected, not the first time that a patient had consoled a doctor about the ineffectuality of his discipline.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“En el folclore de la ciencia hay una historia muchas veces contada sobre el momento del descubrimiento: la aceleración del pulso, la luminosidad espectral que adquieren hechos comunes y corrientes, el segundo de parálisis y arrebato en que las observaciones cristalizan y encajan en patrones, como piezas de un caleidoscopio. La manzana cae del árbol. El hombre sale de un salto de la bañera. La escurridiza ecuación cuadra.

Pero hay otro momento de descubrimiento -su antítesis- que se menciona contadas veces: el descubrimiento de un fracaso. Es un momento, que por lo común, el científico conoce en soledad.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“In 1955, when Philip Morris introduced the Marlboro Man, its most successful smoking icon to date, sales of the brand shot up by a dazzling 5,000 percent over eight months.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“In the glass-paneled sanatorium where patients walked for leisure, Alsop recalled, the windows were covered in heavy wire mesh to prevent the men and women confined in the wards from jumping off the banisters and committing suicide.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Never a cell biologist at heart, as a colleague recalled, he contaminated the cells, infected the cultures, and grew out balls of fungi in the petri dishes.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“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.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Such metaphorical seductions can carry us away, but they are unavoidable with a subject like cancer. In writing this book, I started off by imagining my project as a “history” of cancer. But it felt, inescapably, as if I were writing not about something but about someone. My subject daily morphed into something that resembled an individual—an enigmatic, if somewhat deranged, image in a mirror. This was not so much a medical history of an illness, but something more personal, more visceral: its biography.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“Nearly every known cancer originates from one ancestral cell that, having acquired the capacity of limitless cell division and survival, gives rise to limitless numbers of descendants—Virchow’s omnis cellula e cellula e cellula repeated ad infinitum.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“Cancer is that machine unable to quench its initial command (to grow) and thus transformed into an indestructible, self-propelled automaton.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“in some senses, had not [even] been cancer before World War II.” The illness lived on the borderlands of illnesses, a pariah lurking between disciplines and departments—not unlike Farber himself.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“Future physicians may laugh at our mixing of primitive cocktails of poisons to kill the most elemental and magisterial disease known to our species. But much about this battle will remain the same: the relentlessness, the inventiveness, the resilience, the queasy pivoting between defeatism and hope, the hypnotic drive for universal solutions, the disappointment of defeat, the arrogance and the hubris.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“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.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“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.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Ars longa, vita brevis. El arte de la medicina es largo, nos dice Hipócrates, «y la vida es corta; la oportunidad, fugaz; el experimento, peligroso, y el juicio, imperfecto».”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, El emperador de todos los males: Una biografía del cáncer

“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

“Perhaps cancer defines the inherent outer limit of our survival. As our cells divide and our bodies age, and as mutations accumulate inexorably upon mutations, cancer might well be the final terminus in our development as organisms.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“The antibody, now a potential drug, would soon be renamed Herceptin, fusing the words Her-2, intercept, and inhibitor.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“breast tumors that amplified Ullrich’s gene tended to be more aggressive, more metastatic, and more likely to kill. Her-2 amplification marked the tumors with the worst prognosis.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer