Max > Max's Quotes

“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 Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“How can one capture genes that behave like ghosts," Weinberg wrote, "influencing cells from behind some dark curtain?”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“...lung cancer incidence in men increased dramatically in the 1950s as a result of an increase in cigarette smoking during the early twentieth century. In women, a cohort that began to smoke in the 1950s, lung cancer incidence has yet to reach its peak.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“The daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born with a precocious scientific intellect and a thirst for chemical knowledge, Elion had completed a master's degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941 while teaching high school science during the day and preforming her research for her thesis at night and on the weekends. Although highly qualified, talented, and driven, she had been unable to find a job in an academic laboratory. Frustrated by repeated rejections, she had found a position as a supermarket product supervisor. When Hitchings found Trudy Elion, who would soon become on of the most innovative synthetic chemists of her generation (and a future Nobel laureate), she was working for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise. Rescued from a life of pickles and mayonnaise…”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“I think women are sexy when they got some clothes on. And if later they take them off then you've triumphed.

Somebody once said it's what you dont see you're interested in, and this is true.”
― Groucho Marx

“She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Sunday Philosophy Club