A breast cancer might turn out to have a close resemblance to a gastric cancer. And this kind of reorganization of cancer in terms of its internal genetic anatomy has really changed the way we treat and approach cancer in general.
Siddhartha MukherjeeIn Paris, friend of Bequerelโs, a young physicist-chemist couple named Pierre and Marie Curie, began to scour the natural world for even more powerful chemical sources of X-rays. Pierre and Marie (then Maria Sklodowska, a penniless Polish immigrant living in a garret in Paris) had met at the Sorbonne and been drawn to each other because of a common interest in magnetism.
Siddhartha MukherjeeIn 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 MukherjeeThis was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation.
Siddhartha MukherjeeSandeep Jauharโs Doctored is a passionate and necessary book that asks difficult questions about the future of medicine. The narrative is gripping, and the writing is marvelous. But it was the gravity of the problemโso movingly toldโthat grabbed and kept my attention throughout this remarkable work.
Siddhartha Mukherjee