“Freaks become norms, and norms become extinct. Monster by monster, evo...” — Siddhartha Mukherjee Quote

“Freaks become norms, and norms become extinct. Monster by monster, evolution advanced”

“Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, 'You know, that doesn't look right'.”

“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.”

“In God we trust. All others [must] have data. - Bernard Fisher”

“What does it mean to be an oncologist? It means that you get to sit in at a moment of another person's life that is so hyper-acute, and not just because they're medically ill. It's also a moment of hope and expectation and concern.”

“The reasons for this paring back of synapses is a mystery, but synaptic pruning is thought to sharpen and reinforce the "correct" synapses, while removing the weak and unnecessary ones. "It reinforces an old intuition," a psychiatrist in Boston told me. "The secret of learning is the systematic elimination of excess. We grow, mostly, by dying.”

“The stars, they are as the sun. Each star. Every star. And those spheres- they are worlds, realms, each one different yet the same.”

“It takes a fearless, unflinching love and deep humility to accept the universe as it is. The most effective way he knew to accomplish that, the most powerful tool at his disposal, was the scientific method, which over time winnows out deception. It can't give you absolute truth because science is a permanent revolution, always subject to revision, but it can give you successive approximations of reality.”

“Imaginative humans came together to hunt, farm, trade, and build incrementally sophisticated tools for transportation, communication, productivity, and convenience. ... Tribes and villages became kingdoms and empires, only to later dissolve into the cities and countries of a global civilization. ... Today, we live in concrete jungles, store fruit in fridges, cook oats with microwaves, and carry smartphones in our pockets. Electricity lights up our world, while the energy for it comes from increasingly sustainable sources. Global warming has finally convinced us to grow our food and fuel our activities in ways that do not pollute the planet, exhaust ecosystems, or exploit our fellow animals. We now seek to preserve the environmental stability of the last 10,000 years, during which our species transformed from a few million wandering foragers to nearly ten billion technological titans. Today, we are masters of science, exploring everything from the cosmic to the quantum. We discuss Einstein’s gravity and spacetime relativity, while decoding the molecular mysteries of life and longevity. We fling satellites into orbit, hook computers up to an internet, and seed our society with intelligent programs and robots.”