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
Science is among the most profoundly human of our activities. Far from being subsumed by the dehumanising effects of technology, science, in fact, remains our last stand against it.
Interpretation
Science is a deeply human activity that should not be overshadowed by technology's dehumanizing effects.
Siddhartha Mukherjee's quote emphasizes the intrinsic value of science as a quintessentially human endeavor. Rather than allowing technology to diminish our humanity, science serves as a beacon of human intellect and morality, protecting our essence and fostering our understanding of the world.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of STEM education, this quote can highlight the human aspects of scientific inquiry.
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
We may have to learn to live with cancer rather than die of it. It means a big change in our mindset and how we do research. We haven't quite reached there yet.
One day, I had a patient who was going through chemotherapy who came to me and said, 'I'm going to go on with what I'm doing, but I need you to tell me what it is that I'm fighting.'
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.
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.
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.
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.
Here I am at the turn of the millennium and I'm still the last man to have walked on the moon, somewhat disappointing. It says more about what we have not done than about what we have done.
The latest authors, like the most ancient, strove to subordinate the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics.
As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain will also be a mystery.
I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme.
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