Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes

I have acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive type of cancer. The typical prognosis is 3-6 months to live, but I would like to stress that is for a patient who is not receiving treatment.

Every cancer looks different. Every cancer has similarities to other cancers. And we're trying to milk those differences and similarities to do a better job of predicting how things are going to work out and making new drugs.

When are we going to say cancer is cured? I'm not sure when that will happen, if that will happen because cancer is a very slippery disease and it involves a vast number of cells in the body and those cells are continually mutating.

I've helped many, many, many children, thousands of children, cancer kids, leukemia kids.

Cancer is like a cockroach. It just comes back stronger. I'm tearing apart the immune system of the cockroach and seeing how it ticks. I've opened up my own pathology center.

My eldest son George had acute myeloid leukaemia when he was a tiny baby, he is now 20 and doing very well. He is a mini-miracle in many ways.

In Sept of 2013 I was diagnosed as having an aggressive form of stage 2 endometrial cancer. I underwent a rigorous treatment program that included a radical hysterectomy followed with chemo and radiation therapy.

[Gilda Radner] died in '89, and I got non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2000. I've just passed the five-year mark and I'm now what you call - well, it's called complete remission, but I'm cured. I'm fine.

Although the elusive 'cure' may be a distant dream, understanding the true nature of cancer will enable it to be better controlled and less menacing.

Every day we do get closer to a cure. Three out of four children who are diagnosed with cancer will survive the disease, but that is not good enough. The loss of one child to this disease is too much.

Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.

In America, we have always taken it as an article of faith that we 'battle' cancer; we attack it with knives, we poison it with chemotherapy or we blast it with radiation. If we are fortunate, we 'beat' the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having 'succumbed after a long battle.'

My mother has battled breast cancer three times.

If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer, we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives, including mine.

You can't pick up the telephone and say, 'Connect me with someone else who has a kid with leukemia.'

Hodgkin's is serious and I don't want to be dismissive about it, but there are people who have gone through much worse and lost their lives to cancer.

If you sequence a cancerous tumor, you should be able to tailor the therapy according to the root cause of the cancer. But it has taken so long to do the sequencing - which also requires time to prepare the samples and interpret the deluge of data that comes out - that the patients are already undergoing therapy by the process if over.

We talk about cancer as a noun, as if it's a one time event: 'I've got cancer.'

My dad has had a rare form of leukemia since I was in about 7th grade. But they've come up with some amazing drugs since then and he's doing really well today.

I believe that we are going to have a much deeper appreciation of what kinds of abnormalities in cancer cells and in the surrounding cells that feed and respond to cancers are vulnerabilities that will allow us to make better predictions of which kinds of drugs will work to treat these cancers.

I don't think tongue cancer is the best cancer for an actor.

Although awareness of cancer's prevalence in the United States improves and medical advances in the field abound, pancreatic cancer has largely been absent from the list of major success stories.

In retrospect, I have devoted my scientific life mainly to the question to what extent infectious agents contribute to human cancer, trusting that this will contribute to novel modes of cancer prevention, diagnosis and, hopefully, later on, also to cancer therapy.

Diagnosed incidentally with stage IV, grade 4 metastatic renal cell carcinoma, I had bone metastases in my femur (which eventually fractured), ulna, and cranium; five metastases in my lungs; and muscle metastases in my thigh and tongue. Yet six months after diagnosis, my treatment ended: I've not had a drop of anything since.

Families fighting childhood cancer should not have to worry about where they're going to get the next dose of the drug they need to save their child's life.