The Emperor of All Maladies Quotes

“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, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“In new and sanitized suburban towns, a young generation thus dreamed of cures—of a death-free, disease-free existence. Lulled by the idea of the durability of life, they threw themselves into consuming durables: boat-size Studebakers, rayon leisure suits, televisions, radios, vacation homes, golf clubs, barbecue grills, washing machines. In Levittown, a sprawling suburban settlement built in a potato field on Long Island—a symbolic utopia—“illness” now ranked third in a list of “worries,” falling behind “finances” and “child-rearing.” In fact, rearing children was becoming a national preoccupation at an unprecedented level. Fertility rose steadily—by 1957, a baby was being born every seven seconds in America. The “affluent society,” as the economist John Galbraith described it, also imagined itself as eternally young, with an accompanying guarantee of eternal health—the invincible society.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“headaches, in retrospect, were the first sign of oxygen deprivation).”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“civilization did not cause cancer, but by extending human life spans—civilization unveiled it.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“From several tons of pitchblende, four hundred tons of washing water, and hundreds of buckets of distilled sludge waste, they finally fished out one-tenth of a gram of the new element in 1902. The metal lay on the far edge of the periodic table, emitting X-rays with such feverish intensity that it glowered with a hypnotic blue light in the dark, consuming itself. Unstable, it was a strange chimera between matter and energy––matter decomposing into energy. Marie Curie called the new element radium, from the Greek word for “light”.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Cancer cells grow faster, adapt better. They are more perfect versions of ourselves.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“The Times ad marked a seminal intersection in the history of cancer. With it, cancer declared its final emergence from the shadowy interiors of medicine into the full glare of public scrutiny, morphing into an illness of national and international prominence. This was a generation that no longer whispered about cancer. There was cancer in newspapers and cancer in books, cancer in theater and in films: in 450 articles in the New York Times in 1971; in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, a blistering account of a cancer hospital in the Soviet Union; in Love Story, a 1970 film about a twenty-four-year-old woman who dies of leukemia; in Bang the Drum Slowly, a 1973 release about a baseball catcher diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease; in Brian's Song, the story of the Chicago Bears star Brian Piccolo, who died of testicular cancer. A torrent of op-ed pieces and letters appeared in newspapers and magazines.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Cancer demonstrates a spectrum of behavior. Some tumors are inherently benign, genetically determined to never reach the fully malignant state; and some tumors are intrinsically aggressive, and intervention at even an early, presymptomatic stage might make no difference to the prognosis of a patient. To address the inherent behavioral heterogeneity of cancer, the screening test must go further. It must increase survival.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“It is in vain to speak of cures,858 or think of remedies, until such time as we have considered of the causes . . . cures must be imperfect, lame, and to no purpose, wherein the causes have not first been searched.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“Cancer, in short, was not merely genetic in its origin; it was genetic in its entirety.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“Cancer cells can grow faster, adapt better. They are more perfect versions of ourselves.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Alman tekstil kimyagerleri başlangıçta tümüyle boya endüstrisinin gölgesinde kalmışlardı. Ancak kendi başarılarından cesaret alarak sadece boya ve çözücü değil, koca bir yeni moleküler evreni sentezlemeye başladılar; doğada o ana kadar rastlanmamış fenoller, alkoller, alkaloitler, alizarinler, amitler... 1870'lerin sonlarına doğru, Almanya'da yapay üretimle uğraşan kimyagerler artık o kadar çok molekül üretmişlerdi ki, bu kadarıyla ne yapacaklarını kendileri bile bilmiyordu. ''Uygulamalı Kimya'' kendi karikatürünü yaratmış ve kullanım alanı bulmaya çalışan bir endüstri haline gelmişti.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Farber, kansere karşı yürütülecek bir kampanyanın siyasi bir kampanyadan pek farkı olmayacağını anlamıştı. Bilimsel donanıma ne kadar gereksinimi varsa, reklam stratejilerine de o kadar gereksinimi vardı; simgelere, maskotlara, görüntülere, sloganlara... Herhangi bir hastalığın siyasi odak olması için, tıpkı siyasi bir kampanyanın pazarlandığı gibi pazarlanması gerekiyordu. Yani bir hastalık, bilimsel bir dönüşüm geçirmeden siyasi bir dönüşümden geçmeliydi.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Senato, hedefe daha odaklı biçimde çalışarak kemoterapi ilaçlarının bulunmasını sağlayacak bir program oluşturmak üzere NCI'a yetki verdi. Kanser Kemoterapisi Ulusal Hizmet Merkezi adı altında yürütülen çalışmalar, 1955'e gelindiğinde tam kapasite ilerlemekteydi. Merkez, 1954 ile 1964 yılları arasında 82.700 yapay kimyasal, 115.000 fermantasyon ürünü ve 17.200 bitki türevini test etti ve ideal ilacı bulmak için her yıl yaklaşık 1 milyon fareyi değişik kimyasallarla deneye tabi tuttu.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Temel araştırma, yeni bilgiye yolu hazırlar, bilimsel sermaye sağlar, bilginin pratikteki kullanım için gerekli fonun çekileceği havuzu oluşturur... Temel araştırma, teknolojik ilerlemenin pilidir.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“İlahi bilgeliğe inanmaya hazır olsa da Halsted'e o ölçüde bağlanmaya niyeti yoktu. ''Tanrı'dır tek güvendiğimiz'' diye söylemişti bir gazeteciye sert bir üslupla; ''geri kalanlar verilerini ortaya dökmelidir.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Bannister's mile remains a touchstone in the history of athletics not because Bannister set an unbreachable record - currently, the fastest mile is a good fifteen seconds under Bannister's. For generations, four minutes was thought to represent an intrinsic physiological limit, as if muscles could inherently not be made to move any faster or lungs breathe any deeper. What Bannister proved was that such notions about intrinsic boundaries are mythical. What he broke permanently was not a limit, but the idea of limits.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“The incidence of CML remains unchanged from the past: only a few thousand patients are diagnosed with this form of leukemia every year. "But the prevalence of CML---the number of patients presently alive with the disease---has dramatically changed with the introduction of Gleevec.  As of 2009, CML patients treated with Gleevec survive an average of thirty years after their initial diagnosis.  Based on that survival figure, Hagop Kantarjian estimates that within the next decade, 250,000 people will be living with CML in America, all of them on targeted therapy.  Druker's drug will alter the national physiognomy of cancer, converting a once-rare disease into a relatively common one.  (Druker jokes that he has achieved the perfect inverstion of the golas of cancer medicine: his drug has increased the prevalence of cancer in the world.)”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Even targeted therapy, then, was a cat-and-mouse game. One could direct endless arrows at the Achilles' heel of cancer, but the disease might simply shift its foot, switching one vulnerability for another. We were locked in a perpetual battle with a volatile combatant. ... 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, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Our bodies, our cells, our genes are thus being immersed and reimmersed in a changing flux of molecules -- pesticides, pharmaceutical drugs, plastics, cosmetics, estrogens, food products, hormones, even novel forms of physical impulses, such as radiation and magnetism. Some of them will, inevitably, be carcinogenic. We cannot wish this world away: our task, then, is to sift through it vigilantly to discriminate bona fide carcinogens from innocent and useful bystanders.
This is easier said than done.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Vogelstein’s challenge was that of the landscape artist: How does one convey the gestalt of a territory (in this case, the “territory” of a genome) in a few broad strokes of a brush? How can a picture describe the essence of a place?Vogelstein’s answer to these questions borrows beautifully from an insight long familiar to classical landscape artists: negative space can be used to convey expanse, while positive space conveys detail. To view the landscape of the cancer genome panoramically, Vogelstein splayed out the entire human genome as if it were a piece of thread zigzagging across a square sheet of paper. (Science keeps eddying into its past: the word mitosis -- Greek for "thread" -- is resonant herw again.)”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Perhaps cancer defines the inherent outer limit of our survival. As our cells divide and our bodies age, and as mutations accumulate inexorably upon mutations, cancer might well be the final terminus in our development as organisms.

But our goals could be more modest. Above the door to Richard Peto's office in Oxford hangs one of Doll's favourite aphorisms: "Death in old age is inevitable, but death before old age is not." Doll's idea represents a far more reasonable proximal goal to define success in the War on Cancer.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“¿qué antigüedad tiene la enfermedad? ¿Cuáles son las raíces de nuestra batalla contra ella? O, como muchas veces me preguntaban los pacientes: ¿en qué punto nos encontramos de la «guerra» contra el cáncer? ¿Cómo llegamos allí? ¿Hay un final? ¿Será posible ganar esta guerra?”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, El emperador de todos los males: Una biografía del cáncer

“It was easy to repossess imagination with false promises; much harder to do so with nuanced truths. It demanded an act of exquisite measuring and remeasuring, filling and unfilling a psychological respirator with oxygen. Too much "repossession" and imagination might bloat into delusion. Too little and it might asphyxiate hope altogether.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Like a virus, too, the cigarette mutated, adapting itself to diverse contexts. In the Soviet gulags, it became an informal currency; among English suffragettes, a symbol of rebellion; among American suburbanites, of rugged machismo, among disaffected youth, of generational rift. In the turbulent century between 1850 and 1950, the world offered conflict, atomization, and disorientation. The cigarette offered its equal and opposite salve: camaraderie, a sense of belonging, and the familiarity of habits. If cancer is the quintessential product of modernity, then so, too, is its principal preventable cause: tobacco.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Beatrice finally broke the awkward silence. “I’m sorry.” She shrugged her shoulders and looked vacantly past us. “I know we have reached an end.” We hung our heads, ashamed. It was, I suspected, not the first time that a patient had consoled a doctor about the ineffectuality of his discipline.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“In the turbulent century between 1850 and 1950, the world offered conflict, atomisation and disorientation. The cigarette offered its equal and opposite salve: camaraderie, a sense of belonging, and the familiarity of habits. If cancer is the quintessential product of modernity, then so, too, is its principal preventible cause: tobacco.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“for a creature who, in the space of a few million years—an instant in evolutionary chronology—emerged from primeval forests to hurl himself at the stars.… It was, in any event, a shining reaffirmation of the optimistic premise that whatever man imagines he can bring to pass.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Cancer, Auerbach argued, was a disease unfolded slowly in time. It did not run, but rather slouched to its birth.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“The first medical description of cancer was found in an Egyptian text originally written in 2500 BC: “a bulging tumor in [the] breast . . . like touching a ball of wrappings.” Discussing treatment, the ancient scribe noted: “[There] is none.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies