Kaustav Mukherjee Quotes

As Indians, we must of course learn from the past; but we must remain focused on the future. In my view, education is the true alchemy that can bring India its next golden age. ~ Pranab Mukherjee

There is a duality in recognising what an incredible disease it is - in terms of its origin, that it emerges out of a normal cell. It's a reminder of what a wonderful thing a normal cell is. In a very cold, scientific sense, I think a cancer cell is a kind of biological marvel. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

It felt - nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos - that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Bill by bill, and letter by letter, his scientific imagination was slowly choked by administrative work. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

It turns out that the very genes that turn on in cancer cells perform vital functions in normal cells. In other words, the very genes that allow our embryos to grow or our brains to grow, our bodies to grow, if you mutate them, if you distort them, then you unleash cancer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Charubala, of course, was mindful that the Ghoshes were not perched on a high rung of the caste-ladder, so she was grateful to have a few upon whom she could look down. The gratitude expressed itself as venom for those below. ~ Neel Mukherjee

In China, lung cancer is already a leading cause of death attributable to smoking in men. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children? ~ Bharati Mukherjee

Cancer begins and ends with people. In the midst of scientific abstraction, it is sometimes possible to forget this one basic fact. ... ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

I have seen vast, perhaps unbelievable, changes during the journey that has brought me from the flicker of a lamp in a small Bengal village to the chandeliers of Delhi. ~ Pranab Mukherjee

Mary Lasker was an entrepreneur; she was a socialite. She was kind of a legendary networker. She became interested in saying, 'Well, you know, if these diseases don't have political support we'll never conquer them.' And she made, really, cancer her special cause. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

It was a Rube Goldberg disease. A change in the sequence of a gene caused the change in the sequence of a protein; that warped its shape; that shrank a cell; that clogged a vein; that jammed the flow; that racked the body (that genes built). ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Cancer, we now know, is a disease caused by the uncontrolled growth of a single cell. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Science is often described as an iterative and cumulative process, a puzzle solved piece by piece, with each piece contributing a few hazy pixels of a much larger picture. But the arrival of a truly powerful new theory in science often feels far from iterative. Rather than explain one observation or phenomenon in a single, pixelated step, an entire field of observations suddenly seems to crystallize into a perfect whole. The effect is almost like watching a puzzle solve itself. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

The true lessons to be learned from Albert Speer are those that help us to recognize the Albert Speers living amongst us. ~ Geetanjali Mukherjee

I think the way we think about cancer, the way we treat cancer, has dramatically changed in the last century. There is an enormous amount of options that a physician can provide today, right down from curing patients, treating patients or providing patients with psychic solace or pain relief. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Humor's the hardest thing to translate. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

In the early 1950s, Fanny Rosenow, a breast cancer survivor and cancer advocate, called the New York Times to post an advertisement for a support group for women with breast cancer. Rosenow was put through, puzzlingly, to the society editor of the newspaper. When she asked about placing her announcement, a long pause followed. "I'm sorry, Ms. Rosenow, but the Times cannot publish the word breast or the word cancer in its pages. "Perhaps," the editor continued, "you could say there will be a meeting about diseases of the chest wall." Rosenow ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Dullness is a kind of luxury. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

India introduced Britain to vegetarianism - see Tristram Stuart's excellent first book on this - and it is possible, indeed all too easy, to be a vegetarian in India and eat extraordinarily good, varied food every day, with very few 'repeats.' ~ Neel Mukherjee

The daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born with a precocious scientific intellect and a thirst for chemical knowledge, Elion had completed a master's degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941 while teaching high school science during the day and preforming her research for her thesis at night and on the weekends. Although highly qualified, talented, and driven, she had been unable to find a job in an academic laboratory. Frustrated by repeated rejections, she had found a position as a supermarket product supervisor. When Hitchings found Trudy Elion, who would soon become on of the most innovative synthetic chemists of her generation (and a future Nobel laureate), she was working for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise. Rescued from a life of pickles and mayonnaise ... ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Maybe it doesn't matter how smart you are or aren't, but how much you are willing to learn. ~ Geetanjali Mukherjee

There's a rising cancer trend and, as I said, one of the major contributors is the overall ageing of the population - we aren't dying of other things, so we're dying of cancer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Postwar U.S. was the world's leader in science and technology. The investment in science research was staggering. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

In 2006, the Vogelstein team revealed the first landmark sequencing effort by analyzing thirteen thousand genes in eleven breast and colon cancers. (Although the human genome contains about twenty thousand genes in total, Vogelstein's team initially had tools to assess only thirteen thousand.) In 2008, both Vogelstein's group and the Cancer Genome Atlas consortium extended this effort by sequencing hundreds of genes of several dozen specimens of brain tumors. As of 2009, the genomes of ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, melanoma, lung cancer, and several forms of leukemia have been sequenced, revealing the full catalog of mutations in each tumor type. Perhaps ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Where, in Heaven's name, could anyone even be alone in Calcutta? What hanky-panky business, in my mother's words, could go on? Everyone knew the rules and the rules stated caste and community narrowed the range of intimate contact. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

In India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

I have one very bad experience with a U.K. publisher, who gave it out to be understood that she wanted to publish my book and made me do a lot of changes, all outside a contract, only to reject it in the end. ~ Neel Mukherjee

There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

I am a naturalized U.S. citizen, which means that, unlike native-born citizens, I had to prove to the U.S. government that I merited citizenship. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

Normalcy is the antithesis of evolution. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Mother Teresa's detractors have accused her of overemphasizing Calcuttans' destitution and of coercing conversion from the defenseless. In the context of lost causes, Mother Teresa took on battles she knew she could win. Taken together, it seems to me, the criticisms of her work do not undermine or topple her overall achievement. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

I left Delhi in 1989 and remember very little of how life used to be then. Increasingly, in my recent visits to Delhi, I've started to realize that the city has become intellectually very lively. It makes me want to discover the city over and over again. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee