It is hard to look at the tumor and not come away with the feeling that one has encountered a powerful monster in its infancy
Siddhartha MukherjeeRead
If you take 100 breast-cancer samples, 100 types of cancer have 100 different hallmarks of mutated genes. You could be nihilistic and say, 'Oh, God, we'll never be able to tackle this!' But there are deep, systematic, organizational principles at work in all that diversity.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the complexity of cancer and the potential for understanding its diversity through systematic principles.
Siddhartha Mukherjee emphasizes the diverse nature of cancer, where each sample exhibits unique mutations. Instead of becoming hopeless in the face of such complexity, he suggests that recognizing underlying organizational principles can guide us in tackling the disease more effectively.
Themes
CancerMutationsSystemsDiversityHope
In practice
Example use cases
During a conference on cancer research, this quote can inspire researchers and scientists to focus on finding systematic solutions.
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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.
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