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
A strong intuition is much more powerful than a weal test. Normals teach us rules; outliers teach us laws. For every perfect medical experiment, there is a perfect human bias.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Intuition often holds more significance than conventional testing methods in understanding complex phenomena.
Siddhartha Mukherjee emphasizes the power of intuition over standard tests in research, suggesting that while normal outcomes can provide rules, it is the exceptions and outliers that reveal deeper truths or laws of nature. He argues that personal biases in medical experiments are inevitable, thus highlighting the interplay between objective testing and subjective experience in understanding human health.
Themes
IntuitionTestingScienceExperimentsBias
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on medical research methods, this quote can illustrate the importance of recognizing personal biases.
More from Siddhartha Mukherjee
All quotes →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.
Siddhartha MukherjeeRead
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.'
Siddhartha MukherjeeRead
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 MukherjeeRead
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.
Siddhartha MukherjeeRead
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 MukherjeeRead
Similar quotes
I'm in favor of changing the destination of humans. There are a lot of manned missions that can be done, but not in the direction of the moon.
Buzz AldrinRead
There are as many species as the infinite being created diverse forms in the beginning, which, following the laws of generation, produced many others, but always similar to them: therefore there are as many species as we have different structures before us today.
Carl LinnaeusRead
We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.
Jimmy CarterRead
My emotional investment is in finding truth. If string theory is wrong, I'd like to have known that yesterday. But if we can show it today or tomorrow, fantastic.
Brian GreeneRead
We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.
Richard P. FeynmanRead
At its heart, engineering is about using science to find creative, practical solutions. It is a noble profession.
Queen Elizabeth IiRead