In an essay titled A View From the Front Line, Jencks described her experience with cancer as like being woken up midflight on a jumbo jet and then thrown out with a parachute into a foreign landscape without a map:" There you are, the future patient, quietly progressing with other passengers toward a distant destination when, astonishingly (Why me?) a large hole opens in the floor next to you. People in white coats appear, help you into a parachute and – no time to think – out you go." You descend. You hit the ground.. But where is the enemy? What is the enemy? What is it up to?.. No road. No compass. No map. No training. Is there something you should know and don't?" The white coats are far, far away, strapping others into their parachutes. Occasionally they wave but, even if you ask them, they don't know the answers. They are up there in the Jumbo, involved with parachutes, not map-making. Siddhartha Mukherjee
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More Quotes By Siddhartha Mukherjee
  1. 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...
  2. History repeats, but science reverberates.
  3. Without equality, he argued, eugenics would degenerate into yet another mechanism by which the powerful could control the weak.
  4. 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.
  5. Freaks become norms, and norms become extinct. Monster by monster, evolution advanced
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