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Siddhartha Mukherjee QUOTES

Siddhartha Mukherjee QUOTES

21 " In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practice it much. —Sherlock Holmes, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet "

― Siddhartha Mukherjee , The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

22 " The universe seeks equilibriums; it prefers to disperse energy, disrupt organization, and maximize chaos. Life is designed to combat these forces. We slow down reactions, concentrate matter, and organize chemicals into compartments; we sort laundry on Wednesdays. "It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe," James Gleick wrote. We live in the loopholes of natural laws, seeking extensions, exceptions and excuses. The laws of nature still mark the outer boundaries of permissibility - but life, in all its idiosyncratic, mad weirdness, flourishes by reading between the lines. "

― Siddhartha Mukherjee , The Gene: An Intimate History

23 " Technology, I said before, is most powerful when it enables transitions—between linear and circular motion (the wheel), or between real and virtual space (the Internet). Science, in contrast, is most powerful when it elucidates rules of organization—laws—that act as lenses through which to view and organize the world. Technologists seek to liberate us from the constraints of our current realities through those transitions. Science defines those constraints, drawing the outer limits of the boundaries of possibility. Our greatest technological innovations thus carry names that claim our prowess over the world: the engine (from ingenium, or “ingenuity”) or the computer (from computare, or “reckoning together”). Our deepest scientific laws, in contrast, are often named after the limits of human knowledge: uncertainty, relativity, incompleteness, impossibility. Of all the sciences, biology is the most lawless; there are few rules to begin with, and even fewer rules that are universal. Living beings must, of course, obey the fundamental rules of physics and chemistry, but life often exists on the margins and interstices of these laws, bending them to their near-breaking limit. The universe seeks equilibriums; it prefers to disperse energy, disrupt organization, and maximize chaos. Life is designed to combat these forces. We slow down reactions, concentrate matter, and organize chemicals into compartments; we sort laundry on Wednesdays. “It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe,” James Gleick wrote. We live in the loopholes of natural laws, seeking extensions, exceptions, and excuses. "

― Siddhartha Mukherjee , The Gene: An Intimate History

24 " It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance's link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety - one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars. "

― Siddhartha Mukherjee , The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

25 " In the folklore of science, there is the often-told story of the moment of discovery: the quickening of the pulse, the spectral luminosity of ordinary facts, the overheated, standstill second when observations crystallize and fall together into patterns, like pieces of a kaleidoscope. The apple drops from the tree. The man jumps up from a bathtub; the slippery equation balances itself.
But there is another moment of discovery—its antithesis—that is rarely recorded: the discovery of failure. It is a moment that a scientist often encounters alone. A patient’s CT scan shows a relapsed lymphoma. A cell once killed by a drug begins to grow back. A child returns to the NCI with a headache. "

― Siddhartha Mukherjee

26 " It is tempting to write the history of technology through products: the wheel; the microscope; the airplane; the Internet. But it is more illuminating to write the history of technology through transitions: linear motion to circular motion; visual space to subvisual space; motion on land to motion on air; physical connectivity to virtual connectivity. "

― Siddhartha Mukherjee , The Gene: An Intimate History

27 " Illness might progressively vanish so might identity. Grief might be diminished, but so might tenderness. Traumas might be erased but so might history. Infirmities might disappear, but so might vulnerability. Chance would become mitigated, but so, inevitably, would choice. "

― Siddhartha Mukherjee , The Gene: An Intimate History

28 " ..but because of the systematic neglect of cancer research: "There are not over two dozen funds in the U.S. devoted to fundamental cancer research. They range in capital from about $500 up to about $2,000,000, but their aggregate capitalization is certainly not much more than $5,000,000...The public willingly spends a third of that sum in an afternoon to match a major football game. "

― Siddhartha Mukherjee

29 " Ants have a powerful caste system. A colony typically contains ants that carry out radically different roles and have markedly different body structures and behaviors. These roles, Reinberg learned, are often determined not by genes but by signals from the physical and social environment. 'Sibling ants, in their larval stage, become segregated into the different types based on environmental signals,' he said. 'Their genomes are nearly identical, but the way the genes are used—turned on or off, and kept on or off—must determine what an ant "becomes." It seemed like a perfect system to study epigenetics. And so Shelley and I caught a flight to Arizona to see Jürgen Liebig, the ant biologist, in his lab.'

The collaboration between Reinberg, Berger, and Liebig has been explosively successful—the sort of scientific story ('two epigeneticists walk into a bar and meet an entomologist') that works its way into a legend. Carpenter ants, one of the species studied by the team, have elaborate social structures, with queens (bullet-size, fertile, winged), majors (bean-size soldiers who guard the colony but rarely leave it), and minors (nimble, grain-size, perpetually moving foragers). In a recent, revelatory study, researchers in Berger’s lab injected a single dose of a histone-altering chemical into the brains of major ants. Remarkably, their identities changed; caste was recast. The major ants wandered away from the colony and began to forage for food. The guards turned into scouts. Yet the caste switch could occur only if the chemical was injected during a vulnerable period in the ants’ development.

[...] The impact of the histone-altering experiment sank in as I left Reinberg’s lab and dodged into the subway. [...] All of an ant’s possible selves are inscribed in its genome. Epigenetic signals conceal some of these selves and reveal others, coiling some, uncoiling others. The ant chooses a life between its genes and its epigenes—inhabiting one self among its incipient selves. "

― Siddhartha Mukherjee

30 " 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

31 " Like Bennett, Virchow didn't understand leukemia. But unlike Bennett, he didn't pretend to understand it. His insight lay entirely in the negative. By wiping the slate clean of all preconceptions, he cleared the field for thought. "

― Siddhartha Mukherjee , The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

32 " Far more potently than any miracle medicine, relatively uncelebrated shifts in civic arrangements--better nutrition, housing, and sanitation, improved sewage systems and ventilation--had driven TB mortality down in Europe and America. Polio and smallpox had also dwindles as a result of vaccinations. Cains wrote, "The death rates from malaria, cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, scurvy, pellagra, and other scourges of the past have dwindled in the US because humankind has learned how to prevent these diseases.... To put most of the effort into treatment is to deny all precedent. "

― Siddhartha Mukherjee , The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

33 " 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 Mukherjee , The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

34 " Yaşam kimya olabilir, ama kimyanın özel bir halidir. Canlılar tepkimelerin mümkün olması sayesinde değil, 'ucu ucuna' mümkün olması sayesinde var olurlar. Çok fazla tepkime olsa kendiliğimizden yanıp giderdik. Çok az tepkime olsa soğuyup ölürdük. Proteinler bu ucu ucuna tepkimeleri mümkün kılar ve kimyasal entropinin kıyısında yaşamamızı sağlarlar. İnce bir buzun üstünde kayar ama içine düşmeyiz. "

― Siddhartha Mukherjee , The Gene: An Intimate History

35 " Death (or at least the social meaning of death) could be counted and recounted with other gauges, often resulting in vastly different conclusions. The appraisal of diseases depends, Breslow argued, on our self-appraisal. Society and illness often encounter each other in parallel mirrors, each holding up a Rorschach test for the other. "

― Siddhartha Mukherjee , The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

36 " The approach required more persistence than imagination, but it produced remarkable results. "

― Siddhartha Mukherjee , The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

37 " We had seen the mutants -- and they were us. "

― Siddhartha Mukherjee , The Gene: An Intimate History

38 " Bilim bir dayanıklılık sporudur. O ışık saçan tek deneyi yapabilmek için bin tane ışık saçmayan deney yapıp çöpe atmanız gerekir. Doğa ile sinir sisteminiz arasındaki mücadeledir bu. "

― Siddhartha Mukherjee , The Gene: An Intimate History

39 " Griffith, verilerini 'Journal of Hygiene' diye adını kimsenin duymamışlığı konusunda Mendel'i bile kıskandıracak bir dergide yayımladı. Süklüm püklüm bir tonla yazan Griffith, sanki genetik bilimi köklerinden sarstığı için özür diler gibiydi. Çalışmasında transformasyondan mikrobiyolojideki hoş bir ilginçlik gibi bahsediyor, ama kalıtımın kimyasal temelini keşfetmiş olabileceğine hiç değinmiyordu. Son on yılın en önemli biyokimya makalesinin en önemli sonucu, ağır metin yığının altında nazik bir öksürük gibi boğulup gitti. "

― Siddhartha Mukherjee , The Gene: An Intimate History

40 " Cohen bilim haberciliğinin façası kirli tarafıyla da tanışmış oldu. Bütün bir öğlenini bir gazete muhabirine rekombinant DNA ve bakteri genleri naklini sabırla anlatarak geçirdikten sonra, ertesi sabah şu başlığı okuyarak uyandı: ''İnsan Yapımı Böcekler Dünyayı Kırıp Geçirecek''. "

― Siddhartha Mukherjee , The Gene: An Intimate History