Siddhartha Mukherjee

An organism's individuality, then, is determined not by the gene's selfish dictation but by a complex negotiation between genes and their environment.

The hunger of the gene — to replicate, to survive, to propagate — is the most ancient hunger in the history of life.

We need a word for the opposite of 'trauma.' If trauma is a wound that has healed, then the word we need describes a wound that never closes.

Cancer is not a concentration camp, but it shares the quality of annihilation: it negates the possibility of life outside and beyond itself.

The secret to battling cancer is to find its weakness. And the secret to finding its weakness is to understand its strength.

A cancer cell is an astonishing perversion of the normal cell. Cancer is a disease of pathological cell division — a cell that has breached all the rules of normal growth.