Quotes From "The Emperor Of All Maladies: A Biography Of Cancer" By Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

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

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

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

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

It was Disney World fused with Cancerland. Siddhartha Mukherjee

When a disease insinuates itself so potently into the imagination of an era, it is often because it impinges on an anxiety latent within that imagination. AIDS loomed so large on the 1980s in part because this was a generation inherently haunted by its sexuality and freedom; SARS set off a panic about global spread and contagion at a time when globalism and social contagion were issues simmering nervously in the West. 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

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

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

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