--- DICTIONARIES (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)

Siddhartha (Sanskrit) Siddhārtha [from siddha attained from the verbal root sidh to accomplish, attain, succeed + artha object, aim] One who has attained or accomplished his object, one who has fulfilled the object of his coming on earth; a name given to Gautama Buddha. See also GAUTAMA

--- QUOTES [2 / 2 - 500 / 722] (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)

KEYS (10k)

   1 Saul Williams
   1 Hermann Hesse

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

  407 Siddhartha Mukherjee

   71 Hermann Hesse

   3 Thich Nhat Hanh

   3 Anonymous

   2 Hermann Hesse

1:I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace. ~ Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha ,

2:Coded LanguageWhereas, breakbeats have been the missing link connecting the diasporic community to its drum woven pastWhereas the quantised drum has allowed the whirling mathematicians to calculate the ever changing distance between rock and stardom.Whereas the velocity of the spinning vinyl, cross-faded, spun backwards, and re-released at the same given moment of recorded history, yet at a different moment in time's continuum has allowed history to catch up with the present.We do hereby declare reality unkempt by the changing standards of dialogue.Statements, such as, "keep it real", especially when punctuating or anticipating modes of ultra-violence inflicted psychologically or physically or depicting an unchanging rule of events will hence forth be seen as retro-active and not representative of the individually determined is.Furthermore, as determined by the collective consciousness of this state of being and the lessened distance between thought patterns and their secular manifestations, the role of men as listening receptacles is to be increased by a number no less than 70 percent of the current enlisted as vocal aggressors.Motherfuckers better realize, now is the time to self-actualizeWe have found evidence that hip hops standard 85 rpm when increased by a number as least half the rate of it's standard or decreased at ¾ of it's speed may be a determining factor in heightening consciousness.Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.Equate rhyme with reason, Sun with seasonOur cyclical relationship to phenomenon has encouraged scholars to erase the centers of periods, thus symbolizing the non-linear character of cause and effectReject mediocrity!Your current frequencies of understanding outweigh that which as been given for you to understand.The current standard is the equivalent of an adolescent restricted to the diet of an infant.The rapidly changing body would acquire dysfunctional and deformative symptoms and could not properly mature on a diet of apple sauce and crushed pearsLight years are interchangeable with years of living in darkness.The role of darkness is not to be seen as, or equated with, Ignorance, but with the unknown, and the mysteries of the unseen.Thus, in the name of:ROBESON, GOD'S SON, HURSTON, AHKENATON, HATHSHEPUT, BLACKFOOT, HELEN,LENNON, KHALO, KALI, THE THREE MARIAS, TARA, LILITHE, LOURDE, WHITMAN,BALDWIN, GINSBERG, KAUFMAN, LUMUMBA, Gandhi, GIBRAN, SHABAZZ, SIDDHARTHA,MEDUSA, GUEVARA, GUARDSIEFF, RAND, WRIGHT, BANNEKER, TUBMAN, HAMER, HOLIDAY,DAVIS, COLTRANE, MORRISON, JOPLIN, DUBOIS, CLARKE, SHAKESPEARE, RACHMNINOV,ELLINGTON, CARTER, GAYE, HATHOWAY, HENDRIX, KUTL, DICKERSON, RIPPERTON,MARY, ISIS, THERESA, PLATH, RUMI, FELLINI, MICHAUX, NOSTRADAMUS, NEFERTITI,LA ROCK, SHIVA, GANESHA, YEMAJA, OSHUN, OBATALA, OGUN, KENNEDY, KING, FOURLITTLE GIRLS, HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI, KELLER, BIKO, PERONE, MARLEY, COSBY,SHAKUR, THOSE STILL AFLAMED, AND THE COUNTLESS UNNAMEDWe claim the present as the pre-sent, as the hereafter.We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun.We are not afraid of the darkness, we trust that the moon shall guide us.We are determining the future at this very moment.We now know that the heart is the philosophers' stoneOur music is our alchemyWe stand as the manifested equivalent of 3 buckets of water and a hand full of minerals, thus realizing that those very buckets turned upside down supply the percussion factor of forever.If you must count to keep the beat then count.Find you mantra and awaken your subconscious.Curve you circles counterclockwiseUse your cipher to decipher, Coded Language, man made laws.Climb waterfalls and trees, commune with nature, snakes and bees.Let your children name themselves and claim themselves as the new day for today we are determined to be the channelers of these changing frequencies into songs, paintings, writings, dance, drama, photography, carpentry, crafts, love, and love.We enlist every instrument: Acoustic, electronic.Every so-called race, gender, and sexual preference.Every per-son as beings of sound to acknowledge their responsibility to uplift the consciousness of the entire fucking World.Any utterance will be un-aimed, will be disclaimed - two rappers slainAny utterance will be un-aimed, will be disclaimed - two rappers slain ~ Saul Williams,

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:amethopterin, ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

2:countercampaign ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

3:Is medicine a science? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

4:Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, ~ Robin S Sharma

5:Ars longa, vita brevis. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

6:文明并没有导致癌症，而是通过延长人类的寿命，暴露了癌症。 ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

7:is, in truth, a variety of diseases ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

8:Siddhartha; Aquel que alcanzo sus objetivos ~ Hermann Hesse

9:...the prophets were in it for profits. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

10:If you know the question, you know half. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

11:Normalcy is the antithesis of evolution. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

12:Natures and features last until the grave ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

13:History repeats, but science reverberates. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

14:It was Disney World fused with Cancerland. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

15:In God we trust. All others [must] have data ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

16:A model is a lie that helps you see the truth ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

17:A model is a lie that helps you see the truth. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

18:cells divide, they need to make copies of DNA—the ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

19:Great science emerges out of great contradiction. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

20:Never underestimate the power of . . . stupidity. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

21:God is in no hurry, so why should I be?”), Griffith ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

22:Memories sharpen the past; it is reality that decays. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

23:genotype + environment + triggers + chance = phenotype ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

24:can take the child out of the Depression, but you can’t ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

25:Suspicion, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder, ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

26:All cancers are alike but they are alike in a unique way. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

27:Cancer was not “an unnatural group of different maladies, ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

28:They were self-appointed jesters in a court of fools. The ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

29:mentioned in the book of Leviticus. The Hindu Vedas have a ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

30:One swallow is a coincidence, but two swallows make summer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

31:the laws that ran through nature were uniform and pervasive. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

32:were endemic to each island were also three distinct species. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

33:A model is a lie that helps you see the truth. —Howard Skipper ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

34:In God we trust. All others [must] have data. - Bernard Fisher ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

35:In 2009, Mayfield still remains in remission, now on dasatinib. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

36:And it is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained. —Hegel ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

37:Never underestimate the power of . . . stupidity. —Robert Heinlein ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

38:There is no history; there is only biography,” Emerson once wrote. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

39:It was a conviction that would draw oncology into its darkest hour. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

40:(The name vincristine comes from vinca, the Latin word for “bind.”) ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

41:I had never expected medicine to be such a lawless, uncertain world. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

42:gene (information -> encodes protein (form) -> enables function ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

43:headaches, in retrospect, were the first sign of oxygen deprivation). ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

44:even if he desired it, a surgeon could not extirpate the entire organ. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

45:Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate this very hour, and he stopped suffering. ~ Hermann Hesse

46:The radical mastectomy is rarely, if ever, performed by surgeons today. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

47:The smiling oncologist does not know whether his patients vomit or not. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

48:In the beginning, there was simplicity. —Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

49:Should I refuse my dinner because I don’t understand the digestive system? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

50:A chicken, de Vries realized, was merely an egg's way of making a better egg. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

51:BRCA-1, a gene that strongly predisposes humans to breast and ovarian cancer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

52:Modesty is a virtue,” he would later write, “yet one gets further without it. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

53:Nature is not a temple but a ruin. A beautiful ruin, but a ruin all the same. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

54:Should I refuse my dinner302 because I don’t understand the digestive system? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

55:In God we trust,” he brusquely told a journalist. “All others [must] have data. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

56:Cancer is a flaw in our growth, but this flaw is deeply entrenched in ourselves. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

57:Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

58:It took the full force of human genetics to bring sanity to the study of madness. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

59:You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors? Exchanges ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

60:I do not seek to walk on water," said Siddhartha. "Let [them] be content with such feats! ~ Hermann Hesse

61:I had a novice's hunger for history, but also a novice's inability to envision it. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

62:In God we trust,”509 he brusquely told a journalist. “All others [must] have data. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

63:The discipline of medicine concerns the manipulation of knowledge under uncertainty. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

64:Cancer, we now know, is a disease caused by the uncontrolled growth of a single cell. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

65:Freaks become norms, and norms become extinct. Monster by monster, evolution advanced ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

66:Most of the selected essays share a common thread: They describe how science happens. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

67:Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m as peaceful as Siddhartha, ninety-nine percent of the time. ~ Aubrey Dark

68:Freaks became norms, and norms became extinct. Monster by monster, evolution advanced. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

69:How might a drug coursing through the whole body specifically attack a diseased organ? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

70:I will learn from myself, be my own pupil; I will learn from myself the secret of Siddhartha. ~ Hermann Hesse

71:Never had it been so strangely clear to Siddhartha, how closely related passion was to death. ~ Hermann Hesse

72:syphilis—the “secret malady” of eighteenth-century Europe—was a sensational illness, a ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

73:There are not over two dozen funds in the U.S. devoted to fundamental cancer research. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

74:Every genetic “illness” is a mismatch between an organism’s genome and its environment. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

75:Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell. —Karl Popper ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

76:The dinosaurs who studied dinosaurs would soon become extinct in their own right. Watson ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

77:I am not opposed to optimism, but I am fearful of the kind that comes from self-delusion. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

78:In China, lung cancer is already a leading cause of death attributable to smoking in men. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

79:Junk science props up totalitarian regimes. And totalitarian regimes produce junk science. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

80:Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has existence and is present.” Siddhartha ~ Hermann Hesse

81:as the saying ran, “was one night with Venus, followed by a thousand nights with mercury.”) ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

82:In some nations, cancer will surpass heart disease to become the most common cause of death. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

83:The approach required more persistence than imagination, but it produced remarkable results. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

84:By 1926, cancer had become the nation’s second most common killer, just behind heart disease. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

85:Soot is a mixture of chemicals that would eventually be found to contain several carcinogens. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

86:civilization did not cause cancer, but by extending human life spans—civilization unveiled it. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

87:In science, ideology tends to corrupt; absolute ideology, [corrupts] absolutely. —Robert Nisbet ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

88:Like musicians, like mathematicians—like elite athletes—scientists peak early and dwindle fast. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

89:Normal cells are identically normal; malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

90:Our encounter with cancer has rounded us off; it has smoothed and polished us like river rocks. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

91:Kamala did not try to find him. She was not surprised when she learned that Siddhartha had disappeared. ~ Hermann Hesse

92:Statistics,” the journalist Paul Brodeur once wrote, “are human beings with the tears wiped off, ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

93:The doctors pushing the frontiers of human medicine had forgotten to account for the common cold. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

94:I want to learn from myself, want to be my student, want to get to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha. ~ Hermann Hesse

95:When scientists underestimate complexity, they fall prey to the perils of unintended consequences. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

96:Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

97:I came here to get treatment, not consolations about hospice,” she finally said, glowering with fury. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

98:Its palliation is a daily task, its cure a fervent hope. —William Castle, describing leukemia in 1950 ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

99:What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself. —Franz Kafka Medicine, ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

100:How small a thought it takes to fill someone’s whole life,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

101:If we didn’t kill the tumor, we killed the patient. —William Moloney on the early days of chemotherapy ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

102:I want to learn from myself, want to be my student, want to get to know myself, the secret of Siddhartha.” He ~ Hermann Hesse

103:technological innovations do not define a science; they merely prove that medicine is scientific—i.e., ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

104:Choice," in short, seems like an illusion devised by genes to propagate the selection of similar genes. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

105:All photographs are accurate,” the artist Richard Avedon liked to say, “[but] none of them is the truth. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

106:Any extrapolation of history into the future presupposes an environment of static discovery—an oxymoron. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

107:Bill by bill, and letter by letter, his scientific imagination was slowly choked by administrative work. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

108:I have no desire to walk on water," said Siddhartha. "Let the old shamans satisfy themselves with such skills". ~ Hermann Hesse

109:An Irish surgeon, Denis Burkitt, discovered an aggressive form of lymphoma—now called Burkitt’s lymphoma— ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

110:I have no desire to walk on water," said Siddhartha. "Let the old shramanas satisfy themselves with such skills. ~ Hermann Hesse

111:It is not what you have,” as a certain Brazilian samba instructor once told me, “it is what you do with it. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

112:Leukemia was a malignant proliferation of white cells in the blood. It was cancer in a molten, liquid form. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

113:The word code comes from the Latin caudex, the wooden pith of a tree on which scribes carved their writing. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

114:Second, proto-oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes typically lie at the hubs of cellular signaling pathways. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

115:In 1847, he changed the name to the more academic-sounding “leukemia”—from leukos, the Greek word for “white. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

116:Prostate cancer represents a full third of all cancer incidence in men—sixfold that of leukemia and lymphoma. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

117:This strategy—which cost Min Chiu Li his job—resulted in the first chemotherapeutic cure of cancer in adults. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

118:Organisms exist not because of reactions that are possible, but because of reactions that are barely possible. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

119:There is no such thing as perfection, only the relentless, thirsty matching of an organism to its environment. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

120:I do not wish to achieve immortality through my works. I wish to achieve immortality by not dying. —Woody Allen ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

121:The crucial driver of evolution, Darwin understood, was not nature’s sense of purpose, but her sense of humor). ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

122:It is the impulse of science to try to understand nature, and the impulse of technology to try to manipulate it. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

123:la sagesse ne se communique pas. La sagesse qu'un sage cherche à communiquer a toujours un air de folie. (Siddhartha) ~ Hermann Hesse

124:Siddhartha thought about his situation. Thinking was hard on him, he did not really feel like it, but he forced himself. ~ Hermann Hesse

125:We must learn to count the living with that same particular attention with which we number the dead. —Audre Lorde ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

126:And this was to save rats, right? Or mice? You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

127:We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps. ~ Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha,

128:The very effect of X-rays killing rapidly dividing cells—DNA damage—also created cancer-causing mutations in genes. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

129:To understand cancer as a whole, he reasoned, you needed to start at the bottom of its complexity, in its basement. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

130:As early as the sixth century BC, ayurvedic practitioners in India had recognized the general symptoms of anemia—the ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

131:The God of Worms had evidently left tiny loopholes of chance in the worm’s design, but He still wouldn’t throw dice. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

132:Carla had acute lymphoblastic leukemia. It is one of the most common forms of cancer in children, but rare in adults. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

133:How can one capture genes that behave like ghosts," Weinberg wrote, "influencing cells from behind some dark curtain? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

134:Neither variant was morally or biologically superior; each was just more or less adapted to a particular environment. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

135:HERMANN HESSE Siddhartha Der Steppenwolf ГЕРМАН ГЕССЕ Сіддхартха Повість Степовий вовк Роман Переклад з німецької ББК 84.4ПІ Г 43 ~ Anonymous

136:Cancer changes your life,” a patient wrote after her mastectomy. “It alters your habits.… Everything becomes magnified. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

137:It was, I suspected, not the first time that a patient had consoled a doctor about the ineffectuality of his discipline. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

138:Movable tumors were typically early-stage, local cancers. Immovable tumors were advanced, invasive, and even metastatic. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

139:Seek simplicity, but distrust it,” Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician and philosopher, once advised his students. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

140:Is there something I can do to kill the cancer germ? Can the rooms be fumigated…? Should I give up my lease and move out? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

141:Cancer, Auerbach argued, was a disease unfolded slowly in time. It did not run, but rather slouched to its birth. Auerbach ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

142:Over a man’s life, his semen grew into a mobile library of every part of the body—a condensed distillate of the self. This ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

143:Pero descubrir la naturaleza genética de una enfermedad no era lo mismo que identificar el gen causante de dicha enfermedad. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

144:Siddhartha considered his circumstances. Thinking did not come easily to him. He didn't really feel like it, but he forced himself. ~ Hermann Hesse

145: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

146:A major hindrance to cancer effort has been a chronic, severe shortage of funds—a situation that is not generally recognized. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

147: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 ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

148:La ciencia encarna el deseo humano de entender la naturaleza; la tecnología conjuga ese deseo con la ambición de controlarla. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

149:Dying people don’t have time or energy. We can’t keep doing this one woman, one drug, one company at a time. —Gracia Buffleben ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

150:Illness is used to define wellness. Abnormalcy marks the boundaries of normalcy. Deviance demarcates the limits of conformity. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

151:A patient, long before he becomes the subject of medical scrutiny, is, at first, simply a storyteller, a narrator of suffering— ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

152:When you decide to test for ‘future risk,’ you are also, inevitably, asking yourself, what kind of future am I willing to risk? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

153:Without equality, he argued, eugenics would degenerate into yet another mechanism by which the powerful could control the weak. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

154:As I write this, organisms endowed with genomes are learning to change the heritable features of organisms endowed with genomes. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

155:Radiation can be used to control or palliate metastatic tumors in selected cases, but is rarely curative in these circumstances. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

156:We seek constancy in heredity—and find its opposite: variation. Mutants are necessary to maintain the essence of our selves. Our ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

157:Cancer, perhaps, is an ultimate perversion of genetics—a genome that becomes pathologically obsessed with replicating itself. The ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

158:He had identified a viral carcinogen, found a method to detect it before transmission, then found a means to thwart transmission. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

159:The idea of preventive medicine is faintly un-American. It means, first, recognizing that the enemy is us. —Chicago Tribune, 1975 ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

160:Patients tell stories to describe illness; doctors tell stories to understand it. Science tells its own story to explain diseases. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

161:This book is the story of the birth, growth, and future of one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science: ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

162:Her smile was as fresh as a half-opened lotus. Siddhartha bowed and looked into her eyes, saying in a quiet voice, “Thank you, princess. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

163:Seek simplicity, but distrust it,” Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician and philosopher, once advised his students. Dobzhansky ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

164:The revolution in cancer research can be summed up in a single sentence: cancer is, in essence, a genetic disease. —Bert Vogelstein ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

165:Cancer begins and ends with people. In the midst of scientific abstraction, it is sometimes possible to forget this one basic fact.… ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

166:Doctors were allergic to the smell of death. Death meant failure, defeat--their death, the death of medicine, the death of oncology. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

167:Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

168:If we, as a species, are the ultimate product of Darwinian selection, then so, too, is this incredible disease that lurks inside us. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

169:How many of us have asked the question, ‘If this great country of ours can put a man on the moon why can’t we find a cure for cancer? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

170:It’s easy to make perfect decisions with perfect information. Medicine asks you to make perfect decisions with imperfect information. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

171:The search for a way to eradicate this scourge… is left to incidental dabbling and uncoordinated research. —The Washington Post, 1946 ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

172:Alas, Siddhartha, I see you suffering, but you're suffering a pain at which one would like to laugh, at which you'll soon laugh for yourself. ~ Hermann Hesse

173:Epigenetics, Waddington wrote, concerns "the interaction of genes with their environment (...) that brings their phenotype into being. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

174:Portions of this interview first appeared in OncNurse magazine in February 2011. We are grateful to Christin Melton for her questions. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

175:The art of medicine is long, Hippocrates tells us, "and life is short; opportunity fleeting; the experiment perilous; judgment flawed. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

176:The (cancer) cells, technically speaking, are immortals. The woman from whose body they were once taken has been dead for thirty years ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

177:A Pap smear would give a woman a chance to receive preventive care [and] greatly decrease the likelihood of her ever developing cancer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

178:Cancer researchers knew that X-rays, soot, cigarette smoke, and asbestos represented vastly more common risk factors for human cancers. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

179:It was this very thing, it seemed to him now, which had been his sickness before: that he was not able to love anybody or anything. Siddhartha ~ Hermann Hesse

180:The gene provides an organizing principle for modern biology—and it tantalizes us with the prospect of controlling our bodies and fates. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

181:By the early 1940s, asking about a connection between tobacco and cancer was like asking about an association between sitting and cancer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

182:Other cancer-causing viruses, such as SV40 and human papillomavirus (HPV), would eventually be discovered in 1960 and 1983, respectively. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

183:The poet Jason Shinder wrote, “Cancer is a tremendous opportunity to have your face pressed right up against the glass of your mortality. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

184:Nécessité absolue trouver origine de cet emmerdement [It is absolutely necessary to find the origin of this pain in the ass]. —Jacques Monod ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

185:The cancer cell was a broken, deranged machine. Oncogenes were its jammed accelerators and inactivated tumor suppressors its missing brakes. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

186:There is no permanent status quo in nature,” Muller later wrote. “All is a process of adjustment and readjustment, or else eventual failure.” By ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

187:Tres ideas científicas profundamente desestabilizadoras brotan del siglo XX y lo segmentan en tres partes desiguales: el átomo, el byte y el gen. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

188:Science begins with counting. To understand a phenomenon, a scientist must first describe it; to describe it objectively, he must first measure it. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

189: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

190: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

191: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. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

192:(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

193:Indeed, cancer’s emergence in the world is the product of a double negative: it becomes common only when all other killers themselves have been killed. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

194:There is no such thing as perfection, only the relentless, thirst matching of an organism to its environment. That is the engine that drives evolution. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

195:There is no such thing as perfection, only the relentless, thirsty matching of an organism to its environment. That is the engine that drives evolution ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

196:There is no such thing as perfection, only the relentless, thirsty matching of an organism to its environment. That is the engine that drives evolution. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

197:Doctors treat diseases, but they also treat people, and this precondition of their professional existence sometimes pulls them in two directions at once. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

198: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

199:The word metastasis, used to describe the migration of cancer from one site to another, is a curious mix of meta and stasis—“beyond stillness” in Latin—an ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

200:You will become tired, Siddhartha." "I will become tired." "You will fall asleep, Siddhartha." "I will not fall asleep." "You will die, Siddhartha." "I will die. ~ Hermann Hesse

201:Li had stumbled on a deep and fundamental principle of oncology: cancer needed to be systemically treated long after every visible sign of it had vanished. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

202:Siddhartha looked down at his arm and brushed away the film of dried dung that had settled on it. More dust flew up into the sunlight. I am just dust, he thought. ~ Deepak Chopra

203: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

204:There is a difference between the “cost” of a drug and the “price” of a drug. A pill of Gleevec—I mean, the chemical that we call Gleevec—can be synthesized ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

205:With DNA as with words, the sequence carries the meaning. Dissolve DNA into its constituent bases, and it turns into a primordial four-letter alphabet soup. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

206:Gliomas appeared on the same side of the brain that the phone was predominantly held, further tightening the link. An avalanche of panic ensued in the media. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

207:Three profoundly destabilizing scientific ideas ricochet through the twentieth century, trisecting it into three unequal parts: the atom, the byte, the gene. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

208:Etymologically, patient means sufferer. It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades. —Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

209:It is a peculiar modern fallacy to imagine that the definitive solution to illness is to change nature—i.e., genes—when the environment is often more malleable. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

210: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

211:Gleevec, the commercial name, is used here because it is more familiar to patients. The scientific name for CGP57148 is imatinib. The drug was also called STI571. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

212:The word genocide shares its root with gene—and for good reason: the Nazis used the vocabulary of genes and genetics to launch, justify, and sustain their agenda. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

213:We now know that cells have ancient detectors that recognize viral genes and stamp them with chemical marks, like cancellation signs, to prevent their activation. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

214:It is here that an insight enters our discussion—and it might sound peculiar at first: a test can only be interpreted sanely in the context of prior probabilities. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

215:Third, the relentless cycle of mutation, selection, and survival creates a cancer cell that has acquired several additional properties besides uncontrolled growth. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

216:Cancer is not a concentration camp, but it shares the quality of annihilation: it negates the possibility of life outside and beyond itself; it subsumes all living. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

217:He was willing to have faith in divine wisdom, but not in Halsted as divine wisdom. “In God we trust,” he brusquely told a journalist. “All others [must] have data. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

218:In New York in the 1910s, William B. Coley, James Ewing, and Ernest Codman had treated bone sarcomas with a mixture of bacterial toxins—the so-called Coley’s toxin. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

219:One leukemia doctor wrote, “I know the patients, I know their brothers and sisters, I know their dogs and cats by name.… The pain is that a lot of love affairs end. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

220:the history of Medicine is replete with examples of cures obtained years, decades, and even centuries before the mechanism of action was understood for these cures. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

221:We of the craft are all crazy,” Lord Byron, the high priest of crazies, wrote. “Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

222: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. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

223:there was no detectable association between gliomas and cell phone use overall. Prevention experts, and phone-addicted teenagers, may have rejoiced—but only briefly. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

224:Tu bagi ușor la cap, Siddhartha, învață deci și lucrul acesta: dragostea poți să o cerșești, să o cumperi, să o primești în dar, să o găsești pe stradă, dar nu o poți fura. ~ Hermann Hesse

225:Although cancer is not universally caused by viruses, certain viruses cause particular cancers, such as the human papilloma virus (HPV), which causes cervical cancer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

226:Words are not forms of a single word. In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts. The world must be measured by eye.” —Wallace Stevens, “On the Road Home ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

227:In 2004, a rash of early scientific reports suggested that cell phones, which produce radio frequency energy, might cause a fatal form of brain cancer called a glioma. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

228:Halsted called this procedure the “radical mastectomy,” using the word radical in the original Latin sense to mean “root”; he was uprooting cancer from its very source. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

229: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. I ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

230:A cancer patient today has a team that works around him or her, including nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, and, in some cases, pain and palliative medicine experts. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

231:The cure of even one solid cancer in adults, Farber knew, would singularly revolutionize oncology. It would provide the most concrete proof that this was a winnable war. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

232:You will become tired, Siddhartha." "I will become tired." "You will fall asleep, Siddhartha." "I will not fall asleep." "You will die, Siddhartha." "I will die. ~ Hermann Hesse

233:Yet the personal choice to smoke is… the same kind of choice as the driver who downed the beers, and then the telephone pole. —Open letter from the tobacco industry, 1988 ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

234: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 ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

235:Perhaps cancer, the scrappy, fecund, invasive, adaptable twin to our own scrappy, fecund, invasive, adaptable cells and genes, is impossible to disconnect from our bodies. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

236: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

237:The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. I am also indebted to The Biology of Cancer by Robert A. Weinberg, and to Josh Sundquist, Marshall Urist, and Jonneke Hollanders, ~ Anonymous

238:I don’t know why I deserved the illness in the first place, but then I don’t know why I deserved to be cured. Leukemia is like that. It mystifies you. It changes your life. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

239: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

240:Morbidly interested in genetics and medical research, Mengele rose to become physician in chief at Auschwitz, where he unleashed a series of monstrous experiments on twins. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

241:The clinician, no matter how venerable, must accept the fact that experience, voluminous as it might be, cannot be employed as a sensitive indicator of scientific validity, ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

242:Living humans are endowed with the evolutionary history of our species in our genomes. It is as if we permanently carry a photograph of each of our ancestors in our wallets. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

243:If you prefer an “academic life” as a retreat from reality, do not go into biology. This field is for a man or woman who wishes to get even closer to life. —Hermann Muller We ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

244:In 1788, the Chimney Sweepers Act was passed in Parliament, preventing master sweeps from employing children under eight (children over eight were allowed to be apprenticed). ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

245:Medicine, I said, begins with storytelling. Patients tell stories to describe illness; doctors tell stories to understand it. Science tells its own story to explain diseases. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

246: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

247:Min Chiu Li, the researcher who had been expelled from the institute for treating women with placental tumors with methotrexate long after their tumors had visibly disappeared. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

248:After decades of musing, have we reached the conclusion that fate is, well . . . fate? That being happens through . . . be-ing? I find that formulation illuminatingly beautiful. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

249:Bodh Gaya is a land of enlightenment. Years ago, what Bodh Gaya got was Siddhartha but what Bodh Gaya gave to the world was Lord Buddha, the epitome of knowledge, peace and compassion. ~ Narendra Modi

250:(The professions still often go hand in hand. Both push manual skill to its limit; both mature with practice and age; both depend on immediacy, precision, and opposable thumbs.) ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

251:a ward nurse recalls, “was so deep that doctors would not even look us in the eye when we recommended that they stop their efforts to save lives and start saving dignity instead… ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

252:By now the perpetually changing landscape of breast cancer was beginning to tire him out. Trials, tables, and charts had never been his forte; he was a surgeon, not a bookkeeper. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

253:Technology, I said before, is most powerful when it enables transitions—between linear and circular motion (the wheel), or between real and virtual space (the Internet). Science, ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

254:Quoth Siddhartha: "What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you're searching far too much? That in all that searching, you don't find the time for finding? ~ Hermann Hesse

255:Daß ich nichts von mir weiß, daß Siddhartha mir so fremd und unerkannt geblieben ist, das kommt aus einer Ursache, einer einzigen: ich hatte Angst vor mir, ich war auf der Flucht vor mir! ~ Hermann Hesse

256:There was, perhaps, no more bizarre illustration of the conflation between cleansing and racial cleansing than a law that barred Jews from employing “German maids” in their houses. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

257:in BRCA-1 has a 50 to 80 percent chance of developing breast cancer in her lifetime (the gene also increases the risk for ovarian cancer), about three to five times the normal risk. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

258:Never before in history, and never with such insidiousness, had genes been so effortlessly conflated with identity, identity with defectiveness, and defectiveness with extermination ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

259: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 ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

260:SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE is a cancer physician and researcher. He is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff physician at Columbia University Medical Center. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

261:Fue cuando dije: «Las palabras no son formas de una única palabra. En la suma de las partes, no hay más que partes. El mundo deben medirlo los ojos». WALLACE STEVENS, «On the Road Home» ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

262:It is an old complaint about the practice of medicine that it inures you to the idea of death. But when medicine inures you to the idea of life, to survival, then it has failed utterly. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

263:Low fiber, red meat rich diets increase the risks of colon cancer, and obesity is linked to breast cancer, but much more about these links remain unknown, especially in molecular terms. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

264:To take care of cancer patients is an enormous privilege, but it also involves deploying everything in your toolbox: the emotional, the psychological, the scientific, the epidemiologic. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

265:The universe,” the twentieth-century biologist J. B. S. Haldane liked to say, “is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose”—and so is the trajectory of science.) ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

266:the children and grandchildren of famine-starved individuals tended to develop metabolic illnesses, as if their genomes carried some recollection of their grandparents’ metabolic travails. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

267:It felt—nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos—that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

268:Siddhartha was thus loved by everyone. He was a source of joy for everybody, he was a delight for them all. But he, Siddhartha, was not a source of joy for himself, he found no delight in himself. ~ Hermann Hesse

269:Unidentified flying objects, abominable snowmen, the Loch Ness monster and human cancer viruses. —Medical World News, 1974, on four “mysteries” widely reported and publicized but never seen ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

270:(note the similarities between Lamarck’s theory—of the body giving “instructions” to sperm—and Pythagoras’s conception of human heredity, with sperm collecting messages from all organs). The ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

271:The measurement of illness, Breslow was arguing, is an inherently subjective activity: it inevitably ends up being a measure of ourselves. Objective decisions come to rest on normative ones. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

272:The word palliate comes from the Latin palliare, “to cloak”—and providing pain relief was perceived as cloaking the essence of the illness, smothering symptoms rather than attacking disease. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

273: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

274:In the typical comic book of the fifties, humans ran and hid from the terrifying tyranny of monsters. In X-Men, the mutants were forced to run and hide from the terrifying tyranny of normalcy. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

275:Mucho antes de convertirse en objeto del escrutinio médico, un paciente es, ante todo, simplemente un cronista, un narrador del sufrimiento, un viajero que ha visitado el reino de los enfermos. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

276:In the late 1940s, Saunders had tended to a Jewish refugee from Warsaw dying of cancer in London. The man had left Saunders his life savings—£500—with a desire to be “a window in [her] home.”577 ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

277:It [enlightenment] has not come to you by means of teaching! And-thus is my thought, oh exalted one,-nobody will obtain salvation by means of teachings! (character of Siddhartha, speaking to the Buddha) ~ Hermann Hesse

278:he whispered in the king’s ear, “If you ask me, I think you should find a wife for Siddhartha. Once he has a family to occupy him, he will abandon this desire to become a monk.” King Suddhodana nodded. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

279:From this moment when the world around him melted away and left him as solitary as a star in the sky, from this moment of cold and despondency, Siddhartha emerged, more firmly Self than before, solidified. ~ Hermann Hesse

280:As early as 1935, Hitler had privately mused about ramping up his gene-cleansing efforts from sterilization to euthanasia—what quicker way to purify the gene pool than to exterminate the defectives?— ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

281:It is one thing to try to understand how genes influence human identity or sexuality or temperament. It is quite another thing to imagine altering identity or sexuality or behavior by altering genes. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

282:Whether epidemiology alone can, in strict logic, ever prove causality, even in this modern sense, may be questioned, but the same must also be said of laboratory experiments on animals. —Richard Doll ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

283:Plays by William Shakespeare), “Books I Love” (here she placed Siddhartha, The Painted Bird, On the Road), “Books We Don’t Understand Why People Like” (and here she put Peyton Place and Love Story and Hawaii). It ~ Ann Hood

284:many of my patients continued to smoke, often furtively, during their treatment for cancer (I could smell the acrid whiff of tobacco on their clothes as they signed the consent forms for chemotherapy). ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

285:A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade, regardless of its mechanical skill. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

286:The reason why I do not know anything about myself, the reason why Siddhartha has remained alien and unknown to myself is due to one thing, to one single thing—I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing from myself. ~ Hermann Hesse

287:In 1905, still struggling for an alternative, Bateson coined a word of his own. Genetics, he called it: the study of heredity and variation-the word ultimately derived from the Greek genno, "to give birth. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

288:Show me that you can divide the notes of a song; But first, show me that you can discern Between what can be divided And what cannot. —An anonymous musical composition inspired by a classical Sanskrit poem ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

289:No single strategy for prevention or cure had been a runaway success. But undeniably this "half-full cup" was the product of an astonishingly ingenious array of forces that had been deployed against cancer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

290:I’m sorry, Ms. Rosenow, but the Times cannot publish the word breast or the word cancer in its pages. “Perhaps,” the editor continued, “you could say there will be a meeting about diseases of the chest wall. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

291:Out of this moment when the world melted away all around him, when he stood alone like a star in the sky, out of this moment of cold and despair, Siddhartha emerged, more himself than before, firmer in his resolve. ~ Hermann Hesse

292:Quien prefiera una «vida académica» como una manera de retirarse de la realidad, no debe optar por la biología. Este campo es para un hombre o una mujer que desee acercarse aún más a la vida.[1] HERMANN MULLER ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

293: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

294:Show me that you can divide the notes of a song; But first, show me that you can discern Between what can be divided And what cannot. —An anonymous musical composition inspired by a classical Sanskrit poem Abhed ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

295:Two presentations, among all, stood out in their particularly chilling fervor. The first was an enthusiastic and precise exhibit by the Germans endorsing “race hygiene”—a grim premonition of times to come. Alfred ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

296:Etoposide came from the fruit of the poisonous mayapple. Bleomycin, which could scar lungs without warning, was an antibiotic derived from a mold. “Did we believe we were going to cure cancer with these chemicals? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

297:He looked away with a flicker of irritation. “I know what the statistics are.” His voice was strained, as if tightening against a harness. “Left to myself, I would not even try. I’m doing this because of the kids. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

298:Cancer thus exploits the fundamental logic of evolution unlike any other illness. If we, as a species, are the ultimate product of Darwinian selection, then so, too, is this incredible disease that lurks inside us. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

299:Siddhartha’s priority was to get down to the root of the problem. Buddhism is not culturally bound. Its benefits are not limited to any particular society and have no place in government and politics. Siddhartha ~ Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse

300:then Siddhartha began to understand that his son had not brought him happiness and peace, but suffering and worry. But he loved him, and he preferred the suffering and worries of love over happiness and joy without the boy. ~ Hermann Hesse

301:Thus, for 3,000 years and more, this disease has been known to the medical profession. And for 3,000 years and more, humanity has been knocking at the door of the medical profession for a “cure.” —Fortune, March 1937 ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

302:Evolution can craft perfectly adapted organisms, but not in an intentional manner: it is not just a "blind watchmaker", but also a forgetful one. Its sole driver is survival and selection; its only memory is mutation. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

303:Leukemia is cancer of the white blood cells—cancer in one of its most explosive, violent incarnations. As one nurse on the wards often liked to remind her patients, with this disease “even a paper cut is an emergency. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

304:Scientists often study the past as obsessively as historians because few other professions depend so acutely on it. Every experiment is a conversation with a prior experiment, every new theory a refutation of the old. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

305:The capacity to manipulate genes represented nothing short of a transformation in genetics. We had learned a new language. We needed to convince ourselves, and everyone else, that we were responsible enough to use it. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

306:It has repeated elements that appear frequently. A pesky, mysterious three-hundred-base-pair sequence called Alu appears and reappears tens of thousands of times, although its origin, function, or significance is unknown. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

307:Palliative care, the branch of medicine that focuses on symptom relief and comfort, had been perceived as the antimatter of cancer therapy, the negative to its positive, an admission of failure to its rhetoric of success. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

308:Surgeons walked around with their scalpels dangling from their pockets. If a tool fell on the blood-soiled floor, it was dusted off and inserted back into the pocket—or into the body of the patient on the operating table. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

309:A cancer cell is an astonishing perversion of the normal cell. Cancer is a phenomenally successful invader and colonizer in part because it exploits the very features that make us successful as a species or as an organism. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

310:Every patient’s cancer is unique because every cancer genome is unique. Physiological heterogeneity is genetic heterogeneity.” Normal cells are identically normal; malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

311:It accommodates enough variation to make each one of us distinct, yet enough consistency to make each member of our species profoundly different from chimpanzees and bonobos, whose genomes are 96 percent identical to ours. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

312:My book is an attempt to answer her question by going back to the origin of the disease and showing its development through history. I called it “a biography of cancer,” because it draws a portrait of an illness over time. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

313:Phenotype, in short, drags genotypes behind it, like a cart pulling a horse. It is the perennial conundrum of natural selection that it seeks one thing (fitness) and accidentally finds another (genes that produce fitness). ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

314:Kamaswami conducted his business with care and often with passion, but Siddhartha looked upon all of this as if it was a game, the rules of which he tried hard to learn precisely, but the contents of which did not touch his heart. ~ Hermann Hesse

315:In the 1990s, Barbara Bradfield was among the first women to be treated with a drug, Herceptin, that specifically attacks breast cancer cells. She is the longest survivor of that treatment, with no hint of her cancer remaining. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

316:This book is the story of the birth, growth, and future of one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science: the “gene,” the fundamental unit of heredity, and the basic unit of all biological information. I ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

317:Every generation of cancer cells creates a small number of cells that is genetically different from its parents. When a chemotherapeutic drug or the immune system attacks cancer, mutant clones that can resist the attack grow out. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

318: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 in air; physical connectivity to virtual connectivity. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

319:Like Bennett, Virchow didn't understand leukemia. But unlike Bennett, he didn't pretend to understand it. His insight lay entirely in the negative. By wiping the slate clean of all preconceptions, he cleared the field for thought. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

320: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

321:Why did Kaplan succeed where others had failed? First, because Kaplan meticulously restricted radiotherapy to patients with early-stage disease. He went to exhaustive lengths to stage patients before unleashing radiation on them. By ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

322:A patient with acute leukemia was brought to the hospital in a flurry of excitement, discussed on medical rounds with professorial grandiosity, and then, as a medical magazine drily noted, “diagnosed, transfused—and sent home to die. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

323:You love nobody. Is that not true?" "Maybe," said Siddhartha wearily. "I am like you. You cannot love either, otherwise how could you practice love as an art? Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is their secret. ~ Hermann Hesse

324:Siddhartha has one single goal-to become empty, to become empty of thirst, desire, dreams, pleasure and sorrow-to let the Self die. No longer to be Self, to experience the peace of an emptied heart, to experience pure thought-that was his goal. ~ Hermann Hesse

325:The greatest clinicians who I know seem to have a sixth sense for biases. They understand, almost instinctively, when prior bits of scattered knowledge apply to their patients—but, more important, when they don’t apply to their patients. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

326: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

327:but perhaps within the next five to ten years, certain inborn errors . . . will be treated or cured by the administration of a certain gene that is lacking—and we have a lot of work to do in order to prepare society for this kind of change. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

328:It was a Rube Goldberg disease. A change in the sequence of a gene caused the change in the sequence of a protein; that warped its shape; that shrank a cell; that clogged a vein; that jammed the flow; that racked the body (that genes built). ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

329:Siddhartha began to understand that it was not happiness and peace that had come to him with his son but, rather, sorrow and worry. But he loved him and preferred the sorrow and worry of love to the happiness and peace he had known without the boy. ~ Hermann Hesse

330:Eugenicists such as Priddy had long worried that the flooding of America by immigrants would precipitate “race suicide.” The right people were being overrun by the wrong people, they argued, and the right genes corrupted by the wrong ones. If ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

331:Published as a book with a standard-size font, it would contain just four letters . . . AGCTTGCAGGGG . . . and so on, stretching, inscrutably, page upon page, for over 1.5 million pages—sixty-six times the size of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

332:Truly, nothing in the world has so occupied my thoughts as this I, this riddle, the fact I am alive, that I am separated and isolated from all others, that I am Siddhartha! And about nothing in the world do I know less about than me, about Siddhartha! ~ Hermann Hesse

333:In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practice it much. —Sherlock Holmes, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

334:The picture that emerged from the Minnesota study was not that reared-apart twins were identical, but that they shared a powerful tendency toward similar or convergent behaviors. What was common to them was not identity, but its first derivative. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

335: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

336:Today when I see a patient with CML, I tell them that the disease is an indolent leukemia with an excellent prognosis, that they will usually live their functional life span provided they take an oral medicine, Gleevec, for the rest of their lives. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

337:Labs, too, can become machines. In science, it is more often a pejorative description than a complimentary one: an efficient, thrumming, technically accomplished laboratory is like a robot orchestra that produces perfectly pitched tunes but no music. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

338:"Most people are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path; no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path." ~ Hermann Hesse(Siddhartha, 1922)

339:Every era casts illness in its own image. Society, like the ultimate psychosomatic patient, matches its medical afflictions to its psychological crises; when a disease touches such a visceral chord, it is often because that chord is already resonating. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

340:One researcher estimates that the effect of the D4DR explains only about 5 percent of the variance in novelty-seeking behavior among individuals. D4DR is likely only one of many genes-as many as ten-that determine this particular aspect of personality. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

341:...lung cancer incidence in men increased dramatically in the 1950s as a result of an increase in cigarette smoking during the early twentieth century. In women, a cohort that began to smoke in the 1950s, lung cancer incidence has yet to reach its peak. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

342:Genes must carry out programmed responses to environments—otherwise, there would be no conserved form. But they must also leave exactly enough room for the vagaries of chance to stick. We call this intersection “fate.” We call our responses to it “choice. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

343:Every drug, the sixteenth-century physician Paracelsus once opined, is a poison in disguise. Cancer chemotherapy, consumed by its fiery obsession to obliterate the cancer cell, found its roots in the obverse logic: every poison might be a drug in disguise. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

344:The controlled binding and unbinding of iron and oxygen- the cyclical rusting and unrusting of blood-allows effective oxygen delivery into tissues. Hemoglobin allows blood to carry seventyfold more oxygen than what could be dissolved in liquid blood alone. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

345:And despite its many idiosyncrasies, leukemia possessed a singularly attractive feature: it could be measured. Science begins with counting. To understand a phenomenon, a scientist must first describe it; to describe it objectively, he must first measure it. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

346:But while Darwin's encounters with the "natives" of South America in the 1830s had strengthened his belief in the common ancestry of humans, Galton only saw difference: "I saw enough of savage races to give me material to think about all the rest of my life. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

347:In 1962, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize for their discovery. Franklin was not included in the prize. She had died in 1958, at the age of thirty-seven, from diffusely metastatic ovarian cancer-an illness ultimately linked to mutations in genes. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

348:Zarathustra received his revelations from the archangels at age thirty, when he began his prophetic mission; Siddhartha's great renunciation of his princely life took place in his thirtieth year. Thoreau at age thirty finished his self-imposed isolation at Walden Pond. ~ Kevin Dann

349:In 1977, when Fred Sanger had sequenced the genome of the phiX virus, with 5,386 bases of DNA, that number represented the outer limit of gene-sequencing capability. The human genome contains 3,095,677,412 base pairs-representing a scale shift of 574,000-fold. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

350: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 epitomized the vast and growing rift between scientists and patients. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

351:Children with cancer, as one surgeon noted, were typically “tucked in the farthest recesses of the hospital wards.” They were on their deathbeds anyway, the pediatricians argued; wouldn’t it be kinder and gentler, some insisted, to just “let them die in peace”? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

352:When the heart muscle is forced to push against a blocked aortic outlet, it often adapts by making every muscle cell bigger to generate more force, eventually resulting in a heart so overgrown that it may be unable to function normally-pathological hypertrophy. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

353: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

354:"You do not really love me — you love nobody. Is that not true?" "Maybe," said Siddhartha wearily. "I am like you. You cannot love either, otherwise how could you practice love as an art? Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can — that is their secret." ~ Hermann Hesse

355:Every generation of cancer cells creates a small number of cells that is genetically different from its parents. When a chemotherapeutic drug or the immune system attacks cancer, mutant clones that can resist the attack grow out. The fittest cancer cell survives. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

356:Truly, nothing in the world has occupied my thoughts as much as the Self, this riddle, that I live, that I am one and am separated and different from everybody else, that I am Siddhartha; and about nothing in the world do I know less than about myself, about Siddhartha. ~ Hermann Hesse

357:Within Siddhartha there slowly grew and ripened the knowledge of what wisdom really was and the goal of his long seeking. It was nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life. ~ Hermann Hesse

358:Truly, no thing in this world has so occupied my thoughts as has my own self, the riddle of the fact I am alive, that I am distinct, and separate from all others, that I am Siddhartha! And there is no thing in this world I know less about than about me, about Siddhartha! ~ Hermann Hesse

359:A mutation is only “abnormal” in a statistical sense: it is the less common variant. The desire to homogenize and “normalize” humans must be counterbalanced against biological imperatives to maintain diversity and abnormalcy. Normalcy is the antithesis of evolution. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

360:The father touched Siddhartha's shoulder. 'You will go into the forest,' he said, 'and become a Samana. If you find bliss in the forest, come back and teach it to me. If you find disillusionment, come back, and we shall again offer sacrifices to the gods together. Now go.. ~ Hermann Hesse

361:Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (5 mentions) Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (4) Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (4) Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (4) The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss (4) The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande (4) Dune by Frank Herbert (3) Influence by Robert Cialdini (3) ~ Timothy Ferriss

362:Cancer is a tremendous opportunity to have your face pressed right up against the glass of your mortality.” But what patients see through the glass is not a world outside cancer, but a world taken over by it—cancer reflected endlessly around them like a hall of mirrors. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

363:In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice that the world keeps shifting so quickly under her feet that she has to keep running just to keep her position. This is our predicament with cancer: we are forced to keep running merely to keep still. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

364:Sura-na Bheda Pramaana Sunaavo; Bheda, Abheda, Pratham kara Jaano. Show me that you can divide the notes of a song; But first, show me that you can discern Between what can be divided And what cannot. —An anonymous musical composition inspired by a classical Sanskrit poem ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

365:Illness might progressively vanish so might identity. Grief might be diminished, but so might tenderness. Traumas might be erased but so might history. Infirmities might disappear, but so might vulnerability. Chance would become mitigated, but so, inevitably, would choice. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

366:The Buddha has robbed me, thought Siddhartha, he has robbed me and yet given me even more. He has robbed me of my friend, he who believed in me and who now believes in him. He who was my shadow and who is now Gautama’s shadow. But he has given me Siddhartha, he has given me myself. ~ Hermann Hesse

367:The tightness of genetic linkage, in short, was a surrogate for the physical proximity of genes on chromosomes: by measuring how often two features-blond-hairedness and blue-eyedness-were linked or unlinked, you could measure the distance between their genes on the chromosome. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

368:But another truth should be foremost in mind: that what we call nature today is a kinder, gentler, more depauperate world than at any time since at least the late Paleozoic, some 300 million years ago. Nature is not a temple but a ruin. A beautiful ruin, but a ruin all the same. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

369:Sex, one of the most complex of human traits, is unlikely to be encoded by multiple genes. Rather, a single gene, buried rather precariously in the Y chromosome, must be the master regulator of maleness.I Male readers of that last paragraph should take notice: we barely made it. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

370:Cells depend on chemical reactions to live: during respiration, for instance, sugar combines chemically with oxygen to make carbon dioxide and energy. None of these reactions occurs spontaneously (if they did, our bodies would be constantly ablaze with the smell of flambéed sugar). ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

371: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 breast oncologists at ASCO, Slamon had jumped into his rundown Nissan and driven home. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

372:What if—poring through Graham’s bank in some future era—the selected “genius specimens” were found to possess the very genes that, in alternative situations, might be identified as disease enabling (or vice versa: What if “disease-causing” gene variants were also genius enabling?)? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

373:Bryant shunned reporters whom he saw talking to O’Neal. O’Neal, in turn, refused to accept help from the same trainers who taped Bryant’s ankles. Their desperate coach, the Buddhist, bookish Phil Jackson, wound up consulting a therapist, and at one point recommended that O’Neal read “Siddhartha. ~ Anonymous

374:I shall no longer be instructed by the Yoga Veda or the Aharva Veda, or the ascetics, or any other doctrine whatsoever. I shall learn from myself, be a pupil of myself; I shall get to know myself, the mystery of Siddhartha." He looked around as if he were seeing the world for the first time. ~ Hermann Hesse

375:Facebook users have higher levels of total narcissism, exhibitionism, and leadership than Facebook nonusers,” the study’s authors wrote. “In fact, it could be argued that Facebook specifically gratifies the narcissistic individual’s need to engage in self-promoting and superficial behavior. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

376:It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle. —Sun Tzu ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

377:Instead of trying to tailor the disease to fit his medicine, Kaplan learned to tailor his medicine to fit the right disease. This simple principle--the meticulous matching of a particular therapy to a particular form and stage of cancer--would eventually be given its due merit in cancer therapy. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

378:Siddhartha does nothing, he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he passes through the things of the world like a rock through water, without doing anything, without stirring; he is drawn, he lets himself fall. His goal attracts him, because he doesn’t let anything enter his soul which might oppose the goal. ~ Hermann Hesse

379:Siddhartha looked at Yasodhara and then confusedly at the ornaments remaining on the table. He appeared flustered—there was nothing on the table worthy of Yasodhara’s beauty. Suddenly he smiled. He removed the necklace around his own neck and held it out to Yasodhara. “This is my gift to you, princess. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

380:In an age of increasingly mechanized production, the genesis of scientific knowledge remains an unyieldingly, obstreperously hand-hewn process. It is among the most human of our activities. Far from being subsumed by the dehumanizing effects of technology, science remains our last stand against it. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

381:This isolation was key to Farber’s early success. Insulated from the spotlights of public scrutiny, he worked on a small, obscure piece of the puzzle. Leukemia was an orphan disease, abandoned by internists, who had no drugs to offer for it, and by surgeons, who could not possibly operate on blood. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

382:If a transaction in progress appeared threatened with failure, if a shipment of goods seemed to have gone astray, or if a debtor appeared unable to repay his debt, Kamaswami was never able to persuade Siddhartha that it was useful to speak words of worry or of anger, to have a wrinkled brow, or to sleep poorly. ~ Hermann Hesse

383:I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace. ~ Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha,

384: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 molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

385:Our knowledge of… molecular defects in cancer has come from a dedicated twenty years of the best molecular biology research. Yet this information does not translate to any effective treatments nor to any understanding of why many of the current treatments succeed or why others fail. It is a frustrating time. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

386:We have not slain our enemy, the cancer cell, or figuratively torn the limbs from his body,” Varmus said. “In our adventures, we have only seen our monster more clearly and described his scales and fangs in new ways—ways that reveal a cancer cell to be, like Grendel, a distorted version of our normal selves. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

387:Genetic tests,” as Eric Topol, the medical geneticist described it, “are also moral tests. When you decide to test for ‘future risk,’ you are also, inevitably, asking yourself, what kind of future am I willing to risk?” Three case studies illustrate the power and the peril of using genes to predict “future risk. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

388:As children, Siddhartha and Jesus both realized that life is filled with suffering. The Buddha became aware at an early age that suffering is pervasive. Jesus must have had the same kind of insight, because they both made every effort to offer a way out. We, too, must learn to live in ways that reduce the world's suffering. ~ Nhat Hanh

389:Siddhartha does nothing, he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he goes through the things of the world like a stone through water without doing anything, without making any effort; he is drawn, he lets himself fall. His objective pulls him to itself, for he allows nothing into his soul that might work against his objective. ~ Hermann Hesse

390: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

391:Slowly blossomed, slowly ripened in Siddhartha the realisation, the knowledge, what wisdom actually was, what the goal of his long search was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness. ~ Hermann Hesse

392:Slowly blossomed, slowly ripened in Siddhartha the realization, the knowledge, what wisdom actually was, what the goal of his long search was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness. ~ Hermann Hesse

393:Suggestions for further reading Karen Armstrong, Jerusalem; Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones; Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha; Deepak Chopra, God: A Story of Revelation; Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet; Lawrence Kushner, Kabbalah: A Love Story; C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; Krista Tippett, Speaking of Faith; Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now ~ Paulo Coelho

394:Slowly blossomed, slowly ripened in Siddhartha's soul the realization, the knowledge, what wisdom actually was, what the goal of his long search was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale oneness. ~ Hermann Hesse

395:An arcane microbial defense, devised by microbes, discovered by yogurt engineers, and reprogrammed by RNA biologists, has created a trapdoor to the transformative technology that geneticists had sought so longingly for decades: a method to achieve directed, efficient, and sequence-specific modification of the human genome. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

396:Hodgkin had just returned from his second visit to Paris, where he had learned to prepare and dissect cadaveric specimens. He was promptly recruited to collect specimens for Guy’s new museum. The job’s most inventive academic perk, perhaps, was his new title: the Curator of the Museum and the Inspector of the Dead. Hodgkin ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

397:Six decades and two years, no more than a passing glance of time, separate Mendel's initial experiments on peas and the court-mandated sterilization of Carrie Buck. Yet in this brief flash of six decades, the gene had transformed from an abstract concept in a botanical experiment to a powerful instrument of social control. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

398:There are not over two dozen funds in the U.S. devoted to fundamental cancer research. They range in capital from about $500 up to about $2,000,000, but their aggregate capitalization is certainly not much more than $5,000,000.… The public willingly spends a third of that sum in an afternoon to watch a major football game. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

399:...And yet, my dear, you've remained a Samana, and yet you do not love me, you love nobody. Isn't it so?" "It might very well be so," Siddhartha said tiredly. "I am like you. You also do not love - how else could you practise love as a craft? Perhaps, people of our kind can't love. The childlike people can; that's their secret. ~ Hermann Hesse

400: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. Both push manual skill to its limit; both mature with practice and age; both depend on immediacy, precision, and opposable thumbs.) ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

401:In Eumenides, Apollo, chosen to represent Orestes in his murder trial, mounts a strikingly original argument: he reasons that Orestes’s mother is no more than a stranger to him. A pregnant woman is just a glorified human incubator, Apollo argues, an intravenous bag dripping nutrients through the umbilical cord into her child. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

402:The most extreme novelty seekers-the greatest among the Gatsbys-seemed virtually addicted to stimulation and excitement. Scores aside, even their test-taking behavior was temperamental. They left questions unanswered. They paced the room, trying to look for ways to get out. They were frequently, hopelessly, maddeningly bored. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

403:A gene," Beadle wrote in 1945, "can be visualized as directing the final configuration of a protein molecule." This was the "action of the gene" that a generation of biologists had been trying to comprehend: a gene "acts" by encoding information to build a protein, and the protein actualizes the form or function of the organism. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

404:Buddhism, he thought, is a clean religion. You never heard about how eight people—two of them children—just got blown the fuck up as part of the long-standing conflict between Buddhists and whoever. Buddhists never knocked on your door just when the game was getting good to hand you a tract about what a great guy Prince Siddhartha was. ~ Scott Hawkins

405: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. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

406:Technology, I said before, is most powerful when it enables transitions—between linear and circular motion (the wheel), or between real and virtual space (the Internet). Science, in contrast, is most powerful when it elucidates rules of organization—laws—that act as lenses through which to view and organize the world. Technologists ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

407:When a virus enters a cell, it sheds its coat, and begins to use the cell as a factory to copy its genes, and manufacture new coats, resulting in millions of new viruses budding out of the cell. Viruses have thus distilled their life cycle to its bare essentials. They live to infect and reproduce; they infect and reproduce to live. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

408:Nineteenth-century doctors often linked cancer to civilization: cancer, they imagined, was caused by the rush and whirl of modern life, which somehow incited pathological growth in the body. The link was correct, but the causality was not: civilization did not cause cancer, but by extending human life spans—civilization unveiled it. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

409: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

410:Death (or at least the social meaning of death) could be counted and recounted with other gauges, often resulting in vastly different conclusions. The appraisal of diseases depends, Breslow argued, on our self-appraisal. Society and illness often encounter each other in parallel mirrors, each holding up a Rorschach test for the other. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

411:Illness might progressively vanish, but so might identity. Grief might be diminished, but so might tenderness. Traumas might be erased but so might history. Mutants would be eliminated but so would human variation. Infirmities might disappear, but so might vulnerability. Chance would become mitigated, but so, inevitably, would choice. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

412:the largest “negative eugenics” project in human history was not the systemic extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany or Austria in the 1930s. That ghastly distinction falls on India and China, where more than 10 million female children are missing from adulthood because of infanticide, abortion, and neglect of female children. Depraved ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

413:In 1981, the results of the trial were finally made public. The rates of breast cancer recurrence, relapse, death, and distant cancer metastasis were statistically identical among all three groups. The group treated with the radical mastectomy had paid heavily in morbidity, but accrued no benefits in survival, recurrence, or mortality. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

414:Life may be chemistry, but it’s a special circumstance of chemistry. Organisms exist not because of reactions that are possible, but because of reactions that are barely possible. Too much reactivity and we would spontaneously combust. Too little, and we would turn cold and die. Proteins enable these barely possible reactions, allowing ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

415:The structure of the human genome can thus be likened to a sentence that reads- This......is the......str...uc......ture...,,,...of...your...(...gen...ome...)... - where the words correspond to the genes, the ellipses correspond to the spacers and stuffers, and the occasional punctuation marks demarcate the regulatory sequence of genes. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

416:Halsted’s “cancer storehouse” grew far beyond its original walls at Hopkins. His ideas entered oncology, then permeated its vocabulary, then its psychology, its ethos, and its self-image. When radical surgery fell, an entire culture of surgery thus collapsed with it. The radical mastectomy is rarely, if ever, performed by surgeons today. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

417:that the largest “negative eugenics” project in human history was not the systemic extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany or Austria in the 1930s. That ghastly distinction falls on India and China, where more than 10 million female children are missing from adulthood because of infanticide, abortion, and neglect of female children. Depraved ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

418:Beautiful was the world, colourful was the world, strange and mysterious was the world! Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, the sky and the river flowed, the forest and the mountains were rigid, all of it was beautiful, all of it was mysterious and magical, and in its midst was he, Siddhartha, the awakening one, on the path to himself. ~ Hermann Hesse

419: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

420:Bailey had profoundly changed the conversation around sexual identity away from the 1960s rhetoric of “choice” and “personal preference” toward biology, genetics, and inheritance. If we did not think of variations in height or the development of dyslexia or type 1 diabetes as choices, then we could not think of sexual identity as a choice. But ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

421:Transformation almost never occurs in mammals. But bacteria, which live on the rough edges of the biological world, can exchange genes horizontally (to fathom the strangeness of the event, imagine two friends, one blue eyed and one brown eyed, who go out for an evening stroll—and return with altered eye colors, having casually exchanged genes). ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

422:But in 1960, oncology was not yet ready for this proposal. Not until several years later did it strike the board that had fired Li so hastily that the patients he had treated with the prolonged maintenance strategy would never relapse. This strategy--which cost Min Chiu Li his job--resulted in the first chemotherapeutic cure of cancer in adults. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

423:In the neighboring town of Carlisle, Lister had observed sewage disposers cleanse their waste with a cheap, sweet-smelling liquid containing carbolic acid. Lister began to apply carbolic acid paste to wounds after surgery. (That he was applying a sewage cleanser to his patients appears not to have struck him as even the slightest bit unusual.) In ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

424:In dieser Stunde hörte Siddhartha auf, mit dem Schicksal zu kämpfen, hörte auf zu leiden. Auf seinem Gesicht blühte die Heiterkeit des Wissens, dem kein Wille mehr entgegensteht, das die Vollendung kennt, das einverstanden ist mit dem Fluß des Geschehens, mit dem Strom des Lebens, voll Mitleid, voll Mitlust, dem Strömen hingegeben, der Einheit zugehörig. ~ Hermann Hesse

425: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 whole again. We know of no other mechanism to understand the world: to create the sum of its parts, we must begin by dividing it into the parts of the sum. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

426:This image—of cancer as our desperate, malevolent, contemporary doppelgänger—is so haunting because it is at least partly true. A cancer cell is an astonishing perversion of the normal cell. Cancer is a phenomenally successful invader and colonizer in part because it exploits the very features that make us successful as a species or as an organism. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

427:When most people had to hunt, a minor genetic variation in your ability to focus attention was hardly a problem, and may even have been an advantage [enabling a hunter to maintain his focus on multiple and simultaneous targets, for instance]. When most people have to make it through high school, the same variation can become a life-altering disease. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

428: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. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

429:For years he had been without a home and not felt it. Now he felt it. Up until now, even in the depths of his meditative absorption, he had been his father's son, a Brahmin, a spiritual man. Now he was only Siddhartha, the one who had awakened, nothing more. Deeply he drew in his breath and for a moment he froze and stood shuddering. No one was alone as he. ~ Hermann Hesse

430: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

431:An analogy to natural language illustrates the point. The letters A,C, and T convey very little meaning by themselves, but can be combined in ways to produce substantially different messages. It is, once again, the sequence that carries the message: the words act, tac, and cat, for instance, arise from the same letters, yet signal vastly different meanings. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

432:Smiling, Siddhartha felt happiness at the friendship and friendliness of the ferryman. He is like Govinda, he thought, smiling. All the people I meet upon my way are like Govinda. All of them are grateful, though they themselves have cause to expect gratitude. All of them are deferential, all are eager to be a friend, to obey and think little. People are children. ~ Hermann Hesse

433:Activating or inactivating any single gene, he postulated, produced only the first steps toward carcinogenesis. Cancer’s march was long and slow and proceeded though many mutations in many genes over many iterations. In genetic terms, our cells were not sitting on the edge of the abyss of cancer. They were dragged toward that abyss in graded, discrete steps. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

434:Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.” “A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that! ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

435:Mutants are necessary to maintain the essence of our selves. Our genomes has negotiated a fragile balance between counterpoised forces, pairing strand with opposite strand, mixing past and future, pitting memory against desire. It is the most human of all things that we possess. Its stewardship may be the ultimate test of knowledge and discernment of our species. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

436:When someone seeks," said Siddhartha, "then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal. ~ Hermann Hesse

437:From that hour Siddhartha ceased to fight against his destiny. There shone in his face the serenity of knowledge, of one who is no longer confronted with conflict of desires, who has found salvation, who is in harmony with the stream of events, with the stream of life, full of sympathy and compassion, surrendering himself to the stream, belonging to the unity of all things. ~ Hermann Hesse

438:Every generation of humans will produce variants and mutants; it is an inextricable part of our biology. A mutation is only “abnormal” in a statistical sense: it is the less common variant. The desire to homogenize and “normalize” humans must be counterbalanced against biological imperatives to maintain diversity and abnormalcy. Normalcy is the antithesis of evolution. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

439:Those who have not been trained in chemistry201 or medicine may not realize how difficult the problem of cancer treatment really is. It is almost—not quite, but almost—as hard as finding some agent that will dissolve away the left ear, say, and leave the right ear unharmed. So slight is the difference between the cancer cell and its normal ancestor. —William Woglom Life ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

440: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. 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. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

441:What if somebody came along who could teach me how my world works and how to control it What if I could meet a super-advanced ... what if a Siddhartha or a Jesus came into our time, with power over the illusions of the world because he knew the reality behind them And what if I could meet him in person, if he were flying a biplane, for instance, and landed in the same meadow with me. ~ Richard Bach

442: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

443:Cancer, we now know, is a disease caused by the uncontrolled growth of a single cell. This growth is unleashed by mutations-changes in DNA that specifically affect genes that incite unlimited cell growth. In a normal cell, powerful genetic circuits regulate cell division and cell death. In a cancer cell, these circuits have been broken, unleashing a cell that cannot stop growing. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

444:Cancer, we now know, is a disease caused by the uncontrolled growth of a single cell. This growth is unleashed by mutations—changes in DNA that specifically affect genes that incite unlimited cell growth. In a normal cell, powerful genetic circuits regulate cell division and cell death. In a cancer cell, these circuits have been broken, unleashing a cell that cannot stop growing. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

445:When a person seeks,” Siddhartha said, “it can easily happen that his eye sees only the thing he is seeking; he is incapable of finding anything, of allowing anything to enter into him, because he is always thinking only of what he is looking for, because he has a goal, because he is possessed by his goal. Seeking means having a goal. Finding means being free, being open, having no goal. ~ Hermann Hesse

446:The important fittings were the coffee mugs and the ashtrays, but books were the true furnishings. They were the soul of a room. They defined the identity of the person who lived there in a series of announcements: Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. Charles Reich’s The Greening of America. Richard Neville’s Playpower. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Carlos Castañeda’s The Teachings of Don Juan. ~ Linda Grant

447:When someone is seeking,’ said Siddhartha, ‘it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. ~ Hermann Hesse

448:When someone is seeking,” said Siddhartha, “it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. ~ Hermann Hesse

449:..but because of the systematic neglect of cancer research: "There are not over two dozen funds in the U.S. devoted to fundamental cancer research. They range in capital from about $500 up to about $2,000,000, but their aggregate capitalization is certainly not much more than $5,000,000...The public willingly spends a third of that sum in an afternoon to match a major football game. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

450:The factor VIII project, both teams knew, would challenge the outer limits of gene-cloning technology. Somatostatin had 14 amino acids; insulin had 51. Factor VIII had 2,350. The leap in size between somatostatin and factor VIII was 160-fold-almost equivalent to the jump in distance between Wilbur Wright's first airborne circle at Kitty Hawk and Lindbergh's journey across the Atlantic. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

451:Cancer, in short, was not merely genetic in its origin; it was genetic in its entirety. Abnormal genes governed all aspects of cancer’s behavior. Cascades of aberrant signals, originating in mutant genes, fanned out within the cancer cell, promoting survival, accelerating growth, enabling mobility, recruiting blood vessels, enhancing nourishment, drawing oxygen—sustaining cancer’s life. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

452:In this hour, Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate, stopped suffering. On his face flourished the cheerfulness of a knowledge, which is no longer opposed by any will, which knows perfection, which is in agreement with the flow of events, with the current of life, full of sympathy for the pain of others, full of sympathy for the pleasure of others, devoted to the flow, belonging to the oneness. ~ Hermann Hesse

453:And when Siddhartha was listening attentively to this river, this song of a thousand voices, when he neither listened to the suffering nor the laughter, when he did not tie his soul to any particular voice and submerged his self into it, but when he heard them all, perceived the whole, the oneness, then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was Om: the perfection. ~ Hermann Hesse

454:In Lewis Carroll’s poem, when the hunters finally capture the deceptive Snark, it reveals itself not to be a foreign beast, but one of the human hunters sent to trap it. And so it had turned out with cancer. Cancer genes came from within the human genome. Indeed the Greeks had been peculiarly prescient yet again in their use of the term oncos. Cancer was intrinsically “loaded” in our genome. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

455:In this hour, Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate, stopped suffering. On his face flourished the cheerfulness of a knowledge, which is no longer opposed by any will, which knows perfection, which is in agreement with the flow of events, with the current of life, full of sympathy for the pain of others, full of sympathy for the pleasure of others, devoted to the flow, belonging to the oneness. When ~ Hermann Hesse

456:The notes were cryptic, spontaneous, and raw. On one page, he drew a diagram that would return to haunt his thoughts: rather than all species radiating out from the central hub of divine creation, perhaps they arose like branches of a “tree,” or like rivulets from a river, with an ancestral stem that divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller branches toward dozens of modern descendants. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

457:La resistencia a prestar cuidados paliativos a los pacientes era tan grande que los médicos ni siquiera nos miraban a los ojos cuando les recomendábamos que dejaran de esforzarse por salvar vidas y comenzaran a salvar la dignidad ... los médicos eran alérgicos al olor de la muerte. La muerte significaba fracaso, derrota: era la muerte de ellos, la muerte de la medicina, la muerte de la oncología. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

458:the question that confronts our current era is what happens when this power devolves to the individual. It is a question that requires us to balance the desires of the individual—to carve out a life of happiness and achievement, without undue suffering—with the desires of a society that, in the short term, may be interested only in driving down the burden of disease and the expense of disability. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

459:What if the solution to the structure of DNA could be achieved by the same “tricks” that Pauling had pulled? X-ray pictures would help, of course—but trying to determine structures of biological molecules using experimental methods, Crick argued, was absurdly laborious—“like trying to determine the structure of a piano by listening to the sound it made while being dropped down a flight of stairs. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

460:In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled. —Italo Calvino ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

461:Even an ancient monster needs a name. To name an illness is to describe a certain condition of suffering—a literary act before it becomes a medical one. A patient, long before he becomes the subject of medical scrutiny, is, at first, simply a storyteller, a narrator of suffering—a traveler who has visited the kingdom of the ill. To relieve an illness, one must begin, then, by unburdening its story. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

462:he loved everything Siddhartha did and said and what he loved most was his spirit, his transcendent, fiery thoughts, his ardent will, his high calling. Govinda knew: he would not become a common Brahman, not a lazy official in charge of offerings; not a greedy merchant with magic spells; not a vain, vacuous speaker; not a mean, deceitful priest; and also not a decent, stupid sheep in the herd of the many. ~ Hermann Hesse

463: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

464:The campaign against cancer, Farber learned, was much like a political campaign: it needed icons, mascots, images, slogans—the strategies of advertising as much as the tools of science. For any illness to rise to political prominence, it needed to be marketed, just as a political campaign needed marketing. A disease needed to be transformed politically before it could be transformed scientifically. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

465:This was the tenth month of my "fellowship" in oncology - a two-year immersive medical program to train cancer specialists - and I felt as if I had gravitated to my lowest point. In those ten indescribably poignant and difficult months, dozens of patients in my care had died. I felt as if I was slowly becoming inured to the deaths and the desolation - vaccinated against the constant emotional brunt. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

466:The original Watson and Crick model of DNA, with its hammered metal plates and rickety rods twisting precariously around a steel laboratory stand, is housed behind a glass case. The model looks like a latticework corkscrew invented by a madman, or an impossibly fragile spiral staircase that might connect the human past to its future. Crick’s handwritten scribbles—A, C, T, and G—still adorn the plates. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

467:Even an ancient monster needs a name. To name an illness is to describe a certain condition of suffering—a literary act before it becomes a medical one. A patient, long before he becomes the subject of medical scrutiny, is, at first, simply a storyteller, a narrator of suffering—a traveler who has visited the kingdom of the ill. To relieve an illness, one must begin, then, by unburdening its story. The ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

468: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

469:And when I had learned it, I looked at my life, and it was also a river, and the boy Siddhartha was only separated from the man Siddhartha and from the old man Siddhartha by a shadow, not by something real. Also, Siddhartha's previous births were no past, and his death and his return to Brahma was no future. Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has existence and is present. ~ Hermann Hesse

470: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

471:He looked around, as if he was seeing the world for the first time. Beautiful was the world, colorful was the world, strange and mysterious was the world! Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, the sky and the river flowed, the forest and the mountains were rigid, all of it was beautiful, all of it was mysterious and magical, and in its midst was he, Siddhartha, the awakening one, on the path to himself. ~ Hermann Hesse

472:The result, as the journalist Elizabeth Drew noted in the Atlantic Monthly, was “an unabashed act to protect private industry from government regulation.” Politicians were far more protective of the narrow interests of tobacco than of the broad interest of public health. Tobacco makers need not have bothered inventing protective filters, Drew wrote drily: Congress had turned out to be “the best filter yet. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

473:If man has nothing to eat, fasting is the most intelligent thing he can do. If, for instance, Siddhartha had not learned to fast, he would have had to seek some kind of work today, either with you, or elsewhere, for hunger would have driven him. But as it is, Siddhartha can wait calmly. He is not impatient, he is not in need, he can ward off hunger for a long time and laugh at it. Therefore, fasting is useful, sir. ~ Hermann Hesse

474: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. This ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

475:In 1870, the per capita consumption in America was less than one cigarette per year. A mere thirty years later, Americans were consuming 3.5 billion cigarettes and 6 billion cigars every year. By 1953, the average annual consumption of cigarettes had reached thirty-five hundred per person. On average, an adult American smoked ten cigarettes every day, an average Englishman twelve, and a Scotsman nearly twenty. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

476:In Georgian England, sweeps and climbing-boys were regarded as general cesspools of disease—dirty, consumptive, syphilitic, pox-ridden—and a “ragged, ill-looking sore,” easily attributed to some sexually transmitted illness, was usually treated with a toxic mercury-based chemical and otherwise shrugged off. (“Syphilis,” as the saying ran, “was one night with Venus, followed by a thousand nights with mercury.”) ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

477:Like the master score of a bewitchingly complex symphonic work, the genome contains the instructions for the development and maintenance of organisms. But the genomic "score" is inert without proteins. Proteins actualize this information. They conduct the genome, thereby playing out its music-activating the viola at the fourteenth minute, a crash of cymbals during the arpeggio, a roll of drums at the crescendo. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

478:When someone is searching,” said Siddhartha, “then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes still see is that what he searches for, that he is unable to find anything, to let anything enter his mind, because he always thinks of nothing but the object of his search, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed by the goal. Searching means having a goal, but finding means being free, being open, having no goal. ~ Hermann Hesse

479:Había dado lugar, en última instancia, a este diagrama enormemente influyente que constituye la base de nuestra comprensión del flujo de información en los sistemas vivos: Pero la enfermedad de mi padre ofrece otra perspectiva desde la cual podemos ver de qué manera la información hereditaria influye en la forma, la función y el destino de un organismo. ¿Fue la caída de mi padre una consecuencia de sus genes? Sí y no. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

480:In 2010, about six hundred thousand Americans, and more than 7 million humans around the world, will die of cancer. In the United States, one in three women and one in two men will develop cancer during their lifetime. A quarter of all American deaths, and about 15 percent of all deaths worldwide, will be attributed to cancer. In some nations, cancer will surpass heart disease to become the most common cause of death. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

481:Life may be chemistry, but it's a special circumstance of chemistry. Organisms exist not because of reactions that are possible, but because of reactions that are barely possible. Too much reactivity and we would spontaneously combust. Too little, and we would turn cold and die. Proteins enable these barely possible reactions, allowing us to live on the edges of chemical entropy-skating perilously, but never falling in. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

482:That I know nothing about myself, that Siddhartha has remained thus alien and unknown to me, stems from one cause, a single cause: I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing from myself! I searched Atman, I searched Brahmin, I was willing to dissect myself and peel off all of its layers, to find the core of all peels in its unknown interior, the Atman, life, the divine part, the ultimate part. But I have lost myself in the process. ~ Hermann Hesse

483:Dimly, as if through a veil, geneticists were beginning to visualize patterns and themes: threads, strings, maps, crossings, broken and unbroken lines, chromosomes that carried information in a coded and compressed form. But no one had seen a gene in action or knew its material essence. The central quest of the study of heredity seemed like an object perceived only through its shadows, tantalizingly invisible to science. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

484:The biochemist's approach pivots on concentration: find the protein by looking where it's most likely to be concentrated, and distill it out of the mix. The geneticist's approach, in contrast, pivots on information: find the gene by search for differences in "databases" created by two closely related cells and multiply the gene in bacteria via cloning. The biochemist distills forms; the gene cloner amplifies information. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

485:This it is,” said Siddhartha. “And when I had learned it, I looked at my life, and it was also a river, and the boy Siddhartha was only separated from the man Siddhartha and from the old man Siddhartha by a shadow, not by something real. Also, Siddhartha’s previous births were no past, and his death and his return to Brahma was no future. Nothing was, nothing will be; everything is, everything has existence and is present.” Siddhartha ~ Hermann Hesse

486:Oncologists and their patients are bound, it seems, by an intense subatomic force. So, albeit in a much smaller sense, this was a victory for me as well. I sat at Carla’s table and watched her pour a glass of water for herself, unpurified and straight from the sink. She glowed radiantly, her eyes half-closed, as if the compressed autobiography of the last five years were flashing through a private and internal cinema screen. Her ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

487:Within Siddhartha there slowly grew and ripened the knowledge of what wisdom really was and the goal of his long seeking. It was nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life. This thought matured in him slowly, and it was reflected in Vasudeva's old childlike face: harmony, knowledge of the eternal perfection of the world, and unity. ~ Hermann Hesse

488:Hikmetini ve içyüzünü öğrenmek istediğim şey, Ben’di. Kurtulmak, alt etmek istediğim şey Ben’di. Ama alt edemedim, sadece yanılttım, sadece kaçtım ondan, sadece saklanıp gizlendim. Doğrusu, dünyada benim bu Ben’im kadar, bu yaşıyor olduğum, başkaları gibi ve başkalarından ayrı biri olduğum, Siddhartha olduğum bilmecesi kadar kafamı başka hiçbir şey kurcalamadı. Ve dünyada kendim kadar, Siddhartha kadar az bildiğim başka hiçbir şey yok ! ~ Hermann Hesse

489:Indeed, the mean height of the sons of exceptionally tall fathers tended to be slightly lower than the father's height-and closer to the population's average-as if an invisible force were always dragging extreme features toward the center. This discovery-called regression to the mean-would have a powerful effect on the science measurement and the concept of variance. It would be Galton's most important contribution to statistics. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

490:Out of this moment, where the world melted away all around him, where he appeared as the sole star in the sky, out of this moment of chill and dejection, Siddhartha emerged, more I than before, more tightly gathered in. He felt: this had been the last shuddering of awakening, the final convulsion of birth. And instantly he set out again, starting to walk quickly and impatiently, no longer toward home, no longer to his father, no longer back. ~ Hermann Hesse

491:The experiments progress slowly," Mendel wrote. "At first a certain amount of patience was needed, but I soon found that matters went better when I was conducting several experiments simultaneously." With multiple crosses in parallel, the production of data accelerated. Gradually, he began to discern patterns in the data-unanticipated constancies, conserved ratios, numerical rhythms. He had tapped, at last, into heredity's inner logic. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

492:The secret to battling cancer, then, is to find means to prevent these mutations from occurring in susceptible cells, or to find means to eliminate the mutated cells without compromising normal growth. The conciseness of that statement belies the enormity of the task. Malignant growth and normal growth are so genetically intertwined that unbraiding the two might be one of the most significant scientific challenges faced by our species. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

493:The blooper’ as Watson described it, 'was too unbelievable to keep secret for more than a few minutes.’ He dashed over to a chemist friend in the neighboring lab to show him Pauling’s structure. The chemist concurred, 'The giant [Pauling] had forgotten elementary college chemistry.’ Watson told Crick, and both took off for the Eagle, their favorite pub, where they celebrated Pauling’s failure with shots of schadenfreude infused whiskey. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

494:The many-voiced song of the river echoed softly. Siddhartha looked into the river and saw many pictures in the flowing water. The river's voice was sorrowful. It sang with yearning and sadness, flowing towards its goal ... Siddhartha was now listening intently...to this song of a thousand voices ... then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om - Perfection ... From that hour Siddhartha ceased to fight against his destiny. ~ Hermann Hesse

495:Sound and light, Doppler argued, behaved according to universal and natural laws-even if these were deeply counterintuitive to ordinary viewers or listeners. Indeed, if you looked carefully, all the chaotic and complex phenomena of the world were the result of highly organized natural laws. But more commonly, a profoundly artificial ecperiment-loading trumpeters on a speeding train-might be necessary to understand and demonstrate these laws. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

496:After having been standing by the gate of the garden for a long time, Siddhartha realised that his desire was foolish, which had made him go up to this place, that he could not help his son, that he was not allowed to cling him. Deeply, he felt the love for the run-away in his heart, like a wound, and he felt at the same time that this wound had not been given to him in order to turn the knife in it, that it had to become a blossom and had to shine. ~ Hermann Hesse

497:Ehrlich hedged. The cancer cell, he explained, was a fundamentally different target from a bacterial cell. Specific affinity relied, paradoxically, not on “affinity,” but on its opposite—on difference. Ehrlich’s chemicals had successfully targeted bacteria because bacterial enzymes were so radically dissimilar to human enzymes. With cancer, it was the similarity of the cancer cell to the normal human cell that made it nearly impossible to target. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

498:Govinda was standing in front of him, dressed in the yellow robe of an ascetic. Sad was how Govinda looked like, sadly he asked: Why have you forsaken me? At this, he embraced Govinda, wrapped his arms around him, and as he was pulling him close to his chest and kissed him, it was not Govinda any more, but a woman, and a full breast popped out of the woman's dress, at which Siddhartha lay and drank, sweetly and strongly tasted the milk from this breast. ~ Hermann Hesse

499:Martin Neimöller, the German theologian, summarized the slippery march of evil in his often-quoted statement: First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

500:The double-helix has solved all three of the major challenges of genetic physiology using ingenious variations on the same theme. Mirror-image chemicals are used to generate mirror-image chemicals, reflections used to reconstruct the orginal. Pairs used to maintain the fidelity and fixity of information. "Monet is but an eye," Cezanne once said of his friend, "but, God, what an eye." DNA, by the same logic, is but a chemical-but, God, what a chemical. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

--- IN CHAPTERS (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)

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   2 Psychology
   2 Integral Yoga
   1 Mythology




   2 Words Of Long Ago