The Emperor of All Maladies Quotes

“By sampling asymptomatic women, Papanicolaou speculated that his test, albeit imperfect, might capture the disease at its first stages. He would, in essence, push the diagnostic clock backward—from incurable, invasive cancers to curable, preinvasive malignancies.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“Notably, the average age of diagnosis of women with such preinvasive lesions was about twenty years lower than the average age of women with invasive lesions—once again corroborating the long march of carcinogenesis. The Pap smear had, in effect, pushed the clock of cancer detection forward by nearly two decades, and changed the spectrum of cervical cancer from predominantly incurable to predominantly curable.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“That these cells are still growing with obscene fecundity is a testament to the terrifying power of this disease. The cells, technically speaking, are immortal. The woman from whose body they were once taken has been dead for thirty years.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos: specific and identical mutations existed in particular forms of cancer.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

“And distorted and unleashed, it allows cancer cells to grow, to flourish, to adapt, to recover, and to repair—to live at the cost of our living. 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

“Hodgkin may have been disappointed by what he thought was only a descriptive study of his disease. But he had underestimated the value of careful observation—by compulsively studying anatomy alone, he had stumbled upon the most critical revelation about this form of lymphoma: Hodgkin’s disease had a peculiar propensity of infiltrating lymph nodes locally one by one. Other cancers could be more unpredictable—more “capricious,” as one oncologist put it. Lung cancer, for instance, might start as a spicular nodule in the lung, then unmoor itself and ambulate unexpectedly into the brain. Pancreatic cancer was notoriously known to send sprays of malignant cells into faraway sites such as the bones and the liver. But Hodgkin’s—an anatomist’s discovery—was anatomically deferential: it moved, as if with a measured, ordered pace, from one contiguous node to another—from gland to gland and from region to region.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“In the past, they had pleaded to the nation for funds for cancer. Now, as they pleaded for the nation for a more coordinated attack on cancer, they found themselves colossally empowered in the public imagination. The cure for cancer became incorporated into the very fabric of the American dream. “To oppose big spending against cancer,” one observer told the historian James Patterson, was to “oppose Mom, apple pie, and the flag.” In America, this was a triumvirate too powerful for even the president to ignore.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“The irony of that award could hardly have escaped the researchers at the institute. In America, the landscape of cancer medicine had become so deeply gashed by internal rifts that the most important NCI-sponsored trial of cytotoxic chemotherapy to be launched after the announcement of the War on Cancer had to be relocated to a foreign country.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“On an overcast morning in the winter of 1975, Bonadonna flew to Brussels to present his results at a conference of European oncologists. The trial had just finished its second year. But the two groups, Bonadonna reported, had clearly parted ways. Nearly half the women treated with no therapy had relapsed. In contrast, only a third of the women treated with the adjuvant regimen had relapsed. Adjuvant chemotherapy had prevented breast cancer relapses in about one in every six treated women.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“A generation later, when women with vaginal and uterine cancer were questioned about their exposures to estrogens, a peculiar pattern emerged: the women had not been exposed to the chemical directly, but their mothers had been. The carcinogen had skipped a generation. It had caused cancers not in the DES-treated women, but in their daughters exposed to the drug in utero.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“The inflammation induced by the virus in liver cells, and the associated cycle of death and repair, appeared to be responsible for the cancer—a blow to the notion that viruses directly cause cancer.*”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“RNA could generate DNA. A cancer-causing virus’s genome could become a physical part of a cell’s genes.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“We suggest that the vast catalog of cancer cell genotypes is a manifestation of six essential alterations in cell physiology that collectively dictate malignant growth.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Every era casts illness in its own image.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

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

“Oliver Heaviside, an English mathematician from the 1920s, once wrote jokingly about a scientist musing at a dinner table, "Should I refuse my dinner because I don't understand the digestive system?" To Heaviside's question, Farber might have added his own: should I refuse to attack cancer because I have not solves its basic cellular mechanisms?”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“It could have easily been a formula for disaster-but it worked. Right from the start, the two Emils found that they shared a deep intellectual divide that ran through the front lines of oncology: the rift between overmoderated causation and bold experimentation. Each time Freireich pushed too hard on one end of the experimental fulcrum-often bringing himself and his patients to the brink of disaster-Frei pushed back to ensure that the novel, quixotic, and often deeply toxic therapies were mitigated by causation. Frei and Freireich's battles soon became emblematic of the tussles within the NCI. "Frei's job," one researcher recalled, "in those days was to keep Freireich from getting in trouble.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Haagensen transformed from surgeon to shaman: "To some extent," he wrote about his patients, "no doubt, they transfer the burden [of their disease] to me.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“The journalist Stewart Alsop was confined to one such ward at the NIH in 1973 for the treatment of a rare and unidentifiable blood cancer. Crossing its threshold, he encountered a sanitized version of hell. "Wandering about the NIH clinical center, in the corridors or in the elevator, one comes occasionally on a human monster, on a living nightmare, on a face or body hideously deformed," he wrote. Patients, even disguised in "civilian" clothes, could still be identified by the orange tinge that chemotherapy left on their skin, underneath which lurked the unique pallor of cancer-related anemia. The space was limbolike, with no simple means of egress-no exit. In the glass-paneled sanatorium where patients walked for leisure, Alsop recalled, the windows were covered in heavy wire mesh to prevent the men and women confined in the wards from jumping off the banisters and committing suicide.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Science embodies the human desire to understand nature; technology couples that desire with the ambition to control nature. These are related impulses-one might seek to understand nature in order to control it-but the drive to intervene is unique to technology. Medicine, then, is fundamentally a technological art; at its core lies a desire to improve human lives by intervening on life itself. Conceptually, the battle against cancer pushes the idea of technology to the far edge, for the object being intervened upon is our genome. It is unclear whether an intervention that discriminates between malignant and normal growth is even possible. 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. Perhaps cancer defines the inherent outer limit of our survival. As our cells divide and our bodies age, cancer might well be the final terminus in our development as organisms.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Los médicos son hombres que recetan medicamentos de los que saben poco, para curar enfermedades de las que saben menos, en seres humanos de quienes no saben nada.”
― Horacio Pons, El emperador de todos los males: Una biografía del cáncer

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

“While the mechanistic understanding of the cancer cell remained suspended in limbo between viruses and chromosomes, a revolution in the understanding of normal cells was sweeping through biology in the early twentieth century. The seeds of this revolution were planted by a retiring, nearsighted monk in an isolated abbey in Brno, Austria, who bred pea plants as a hobby. In the early 1860s, working alone, Gregor Mendel had identified a few characteristics in his purebred plants that were inherited from one generation to the next—the color of the pea flower, the texture of the pea seed, the height of the pea plant.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“«Se lo llama programa de inmersión en formación médica —dijo, bajando la voz—. Pero lo de inmersión significa en realidad que te ahogas. No dejes que se inmiscuya en todo lo que haces. Ten una vida al margen del hospital. Vas a necesitarla; de lo contrario, te tragará.»”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, El emperador de todos los males: Una biografía del cáncer

“To arrive at that sort of logic—the Hippocratic oath turned upside down—demands either a terminal desperation or a terminal optimism.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Los médicos son hombres que recetan medicamentos de los que saben poco, para curar enfermedades de las que saben menos, en seres humanos de quienes no saben nada. VOLTAIRE”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, El emperador de todos los males: Una biografía del cáncer

“Se dice que si conoces a tus enemigos y te conoces a ti mismo no correrás peligro ni en cien batallas; si no conoces a tus enemigos pero te conoces a ti mismo, ganarás una y perderás otra; si no conoces a tus enemigos ni te conoces a ti mismo, estarás en peligro en todas y cada una de las batallas. SUNZI1”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, El emperador de todos los males: Una biografía del cáncer

“In the summer of 1984, a team of researchers, collaborating with Weinberg, discovered the human homolog of the neu gene. Noting its resemblance to another growth-modulating gene discovered previously—the Human EGF Receptor (HER)—the researchers called the gene Her-2.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

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

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