Subarna Mukherjee Quotes

Scientists divide. We discriminate. It is the inevitable occupational hazard of our profession that we must break the world into its constituent parts -- genes, atoms, bytes -- before making it whole again. We know of no other mechanism to understand the world: to create the sum of its parts, we must begin by dividing it into the parts of the sum. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

I was born a Brahmin, but I'm not a Brahmin ~ Rudrangshu Mukherjee

Nearly every one of the genes that turns out to be a key player in cancer has a vital role in the normal physiology of an organism. The genes that enable our brains and blood cells to develop are implicated in cancer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

But the story of leukemia
the story of cancer
isn't the story of doctors who struggle and survive, moving from institution to another. It is the story of patients who struggle and survive, moving from on embankment of illness to another. Resilience, inventiveness, and survivorship
qualities often ascribed to great physicians
are reflected qualities, emanating first from those who struggle with illness and only then mirrored by those who treat them. If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled. - Italo Calvino ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

1945-1990 - Russophobia
1990-2015 - Islamophobia
2015- ?? - Russophobia AND Islamophobia.
Isnt it time the MI Complex created a new bogey-man? ~ Arindam Mukherjee

The divorced Indian lady combines every fantasy about the liberated, wicked Western woman with the safety net of basic submissive familiarity. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

I'm very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don't really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It's about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

Sandeep Jauhar's 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 problem - so movingly told - that grabbed and kept my attention throughout this remarkable work. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

You're eating like a sparrow nowadays. You've hardly touched your food.' 'You give me so much. There are so many dishes.' 'Where so many? One dal, one fry, one vegetable dish, a bit of fish, that's it.' 'And you don't think that's a lot?' 'You've eaten like this all your life,' she said, baffled. 'Don't you agree we eat too much?' 'Who, you and I?' she asked, still puzzled. 'No, no, by "we" I mean all of us, everyone in our social and economic class. ~ Neel Mukherjee

Bengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously dying for more than a century. They resent with equal ferocity the reflex stereotyping that labels any civic dysfunction anywhere in the world 'another Calcutta.' ~ Bharati Mukherjee

The approach required more persistence than imagination, but it produced remarkable results. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

The proteins create a gradient within the egg. Like sugar diffusing out of a cube in a cup of coffee, they are present at high concentration on one end of the egg, and low concentration on the other. The diffusion of a chemical through a matrix of protein can even create distinct, three-dimensional patterns-like a pool of syrup ribboning into oatmeal. Specific genes are activated at the high-concentration end versus at the low-concentration end, thereby allowing the head-tail axis to be defined, or other patterns to be formed. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

My life has gotten a little more complicated than my ability to describe it. That used to be the definition of madness, now it's just continuous overload. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

This is how this world runs, a small group of people who know each other, a closed world of intense curiosity in other people's lives because your own is just empty, dead time. ~ Neel Mukherjee

In New York in the 1910s, William B. Coley, James Ewing, and Ernest Codman had treated bone sarcomas with a mixture of bacterial toxins - the so-called Coley's toxin. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

The government of India and the government of Jammu and Kashmir are determined to ensure that every Kashmiri lives with dignity having equal rights and equal opportunities. ~ Pranab Mukherjee

When I feel broken, I cry like the monsoons; and when I glue the pieces back together, I swell and surge like the sea. And then I gradually become tranquil, peaceful, calm ... ~ Subarna Prasad Acharya

We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It's a question of time, not motive. ~ 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

In the late 1940s, Saunders had tended to a Jewish refugee from Warsaw dying of cancer in London. The man had left Saunders his life savings - £500 - with a desire to be "a window in [her] home."577 ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

The secret to battling cancer, then, is to find means to prevent these mutations from occurring in susceptible cells, or to find means to eliminate the mutated cells without compromising normal growth. The conciseness of that statement belies the enormity of the task. Malignant growth and normal growth are so genetically intertwined that unbraiding the two might be one of the most significant scientific challenges faced by our species. Cancer is built into our genomes: the genes that unmoor normal cell division are not foreign to our bodies, but rather mutated, distorted versions of the very genes that perform vital cellular functions. And cancer is imprinted in our society: as we extend our life span as a species, we inevitably unleash malignant growth (mutations in cancer genes accumulate with aging; cancer is thus intrinsically related to age). If we seek immortality, then so, too, in a rather perverse sense, does the cancer cell. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

The landscape of carcinogens is not static either. We are chemical apes: having discovered the capacity to extract, purify, and react molecules to produce new and wondrous molecules, we have begun to spin a new chemical universe around ourselves. 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 these, inevitably, will 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. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

That more than 90 per cent of the Indian population should continue to be illiterate even after 175 years of British rule in this country is an intolerable situation which calls for immediate action. ~ Syama Prasad Mukherjee

A major hindrance to cancer effort has been a chronic, severe shortage of funds - a situation that is not generally recognized. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Second, proto-oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes typically lie at the hubs of cellular signaling pathways. ~ 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

Mutants are necessary to maintain the essence of our selves. Our genomes has negotiated a fragile balance between counterpoised forces, pairing strand with opposite strand, mixing past and future, pitting memory against desire. It is the most human of all things that we possess. Its stewardship may be the ultimate test of knowledge and discernment of our species. ~ 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

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

Every era casts illness in its own image. 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

One swallow is a coincidence, but two swallows make summer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

In an age of increasingly mechanized production, the genesis of scientific knowledge remains an unyieldingly, obstreperously hand-hewn process. It is among the most human of our activities. Far from being subsumed by the dehumanizing effects of technology, science remains our last stand against it. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, 'You know, that doesn't look right'. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

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 ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

An Irish surgeon, Denis Burkitt, discovered an aggressive form of lymphoma - now called Burkitt's lymphoma - ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Mollycoddling was the mother's duty; the father's lay elsewhere. As a consequence, his four older children feared and respected him, as they had been taught to do, and the love the professed to feel, had they been asked and had they answered truthfully or even had access to the truth, was of a duty-bound, obligatory kind too, a love issuing from commandment and tradition and the notion of family, not one from the tides of the heart or the unbridled, inexplicable pull of feelings. If painted, that love would take the form of a polite and manicured wash of pleasant colours, not the hurl-and-splatter of impastoed reds. ~ Neel Mukherjee

Ehrlich hedged. The cancer cell, he explained, was a fundamentally different target from a bacterial cell. Specific affinity relied, paradoxically, not on "affinity," but on its opposite - on difference. Ehrlich's chemicals had successfully targeted bacteria because bacterial enzymes were so radically dissimilar to human enzymes. With cancer, it was the similarity of the cancer cell to the normal human cell that made it nearly impossible to target. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Medicine, I said, begins with storytelling. Patients tell stories to describe illness; doctors tell stories to understand it. Science tells its own story to explain diseases. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

It's making life important, making a single life important, rather than having a prescription for the global ills which afflict us. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

Cancer, perhaps, is an ultimate perversion of genetics - a genome that becomes pathologically obsessed with replicating itself. The ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Build a beautiful attitude,you build a world beautifully. ~ Dadang Subarna

Dullness is a kind of luxury. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

The most intriguing correlations obtained by the Minnesota study were also among the most unexpected. Social and political attitudes between twins reared apart were just as concordant as those between twins reared together: liberals clustered with liberals, and orthodoxy was twinned with orthodoxy. Religiosity and faith were also strikingly concordant: twins were either both faithful or both nonreligious. Traditionalism, or "willingness to yield to authority," was significantly correlated. So were characteristics such as "assertiveness, drive for leadership, and a taste for attention." Other ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

Writing a book is as difficult or as easy as any other job. Everyone's job is difficult. So to fetishize difficulties in writing as something extra-difficult or something very privileged - I don't buy that at all. ~ Neel Mukherjee

I come from a political family. My father was a freedom fighter. He was a prominent leader of the locality and member of the Congress party. He spent 10 years in British prisons. In the evening, in our living room, the only subject we used to discuss was politics. So politics was not unfamiliar to me. ~ Pranab Mukherjee

I don't read my books, so I don't allow myself the dangerous luxury of toying with the idea of doing things differently. ~ Neel Mukherjee