{"author":"Siddhartha Mukherjee","author_id":"Siddhartha+Mukherjee","total_quotes":30,"quotes":[{"text":"My memory of my household is of one immersed in books and music. I have a very intimate relationship with Bengali literature, particularly Tagore, and my interest besides reading then was music.","author":"Siddhartha Mukherjee","tags":["music","memory","reading "],"id":2145,"author_id":"Siddhartha+Mukherjee"},{"text":"The cure of even one solid cancer in adults, Farber knew, would singularly revolutionize oncology. It would provide the most concrete proof that this was a winnable war.","author":"Siddhartha Mukherjee","tags":["cancer","medicine","oncology"],"id":13409,"author_id":"Siddhartha+Mukherjee"},{"text":"History repeats, but science reverberates.","author":"Siddhartha Mukherjee","tags":["science"],"id":49590,"author_id":"Siddhartha+Mukherjee"},{"text":"If we define 'beauty' as having blue eyes (and only blue eyes), then we will, indeed, find a 'gene for beauty.' If we define 'intelligence' as the performance on only one kind of test, then we will, indeed, find a 'gene for intelligence.' The genome is only a mirror for the breadth or narrowness of human imagination.","author":"Siddhartha Mukherjee","tags":["genetics","human-nature","life-lessons","science"],"id":58852,"author_id":"Siddhartha+Mukherjee"},{"text":"The problem with racial discrimination, though, is not the inference of a person's race from their genetic characteristics. It is quite the opposite: it is the inference of a person's characteristics from their race. The question is not, can you, given an individual's skin color, hair texture, or language, infer something about their ancestry or origin. That is a question of biological systematics -- of lineage, taxonomy, of racial geography, of biological discrimination. Of course you can -- and genomics as vastly refined that inference. You can scan any individual genome and infer rather deep insights about a person's ancestry, or place of origin. But the vastly more controversial question is the converse: Given a racial identity -- African or Asian, say -- can you infer anything about an individual's characteristics: not just skin or hair color, but more complex features, such as intelligence, habits, personality, and aptitude? /I/ Genes can certainly tell us about race, but can race tell us anything about genes? /I/To answer this question, we need to measure how genetic variation is distributed across various racial categories. Is there more diversity _within_ races or _between_ races? Does knowing that someone is of African versus European descent, say, allow us to refine our understanding of their genetic traits, or their personal, physical, or intellectual attributes in a meaningful manner? Or is there so much variation within Africans and Europeans that _intraracial_ diversity dominates the comparison, thereby making the category 'African' or 'European' moot?We now know precise and quantitative answers to these questions. A number of studies have tried to quantify the level of genetic diversity of the human genome. The most recent estimates suggest that the vast proportion of genetic diversity (85 to 90 percent) occurs _within_ so-called races (I.E., within Asians or Africans) and only a minor proportion (7 percent) within racial groups (the geneticist Richard Lewontin had estimated a similar distribution as early as 1972). Some genes certainly vary sharply between racial or ethnic groups -- sickle-cell anemia is an Afro-Caribbean and Indian disease, and Tay-Sachs disease has a much higher frequency in Ashkenazi Jews -- but for the most part, the genetic diversity within any racial group dominates the diversity between racial groups -- not marginally, but by an enormous amount. The degree of interracial variability makes 'race' a poor surrogate for nearly any feature: in a genetic sense, an African man from Nigria is so 'different' from another man from Namibia that it makes little sense to lump them into the same category.","author":"Siddhartha Mukherjee","tags":["anthropology","diversity","evolution","genes","genetics","race","racism"],"id":95869,"author_id":"Siddhartha+Mukherjee"},{"text":"And this was to save rats, right? Or mice? You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors?","author":"Siddhartha Mukherjee","tags":["cancer","science"],"id":134189,"author_id":"Siddhartha+Mukherjee"},{"text":"When scientists underestimate complexity, they fall prey to the perils of unintended consequences. The parables of such scientific overreach are well-known: foreign animals, introduced to control pests, become pests in their own right; the raising of smokestacks, meant to alleviate urban pollution, releases particulate effluents higher in the air and exacerbates pollution; stimulating blood formation, meant to prevent heart attacks, thickens the blood and results in an increased risk of blood clots in the heart. But when nonscientists overestimate [italicized, sic] complexity- 'No one can possibly crack this [italicized, sic] code' - they fall into the trap of unanticipated consequences. In the early 1950s , a common trope among some biologists was that the genetic code would be so context dependent- so utterly determined by a particular cell in a particular organism and so horribly convoluted- that deciphering it would be impossible. The truth turned out to be quite the opposite: just one molecule carries the code, and just one code pervades the biological world. If we know the code, we can intentionally alter it in organisms, and ultimately in humans. Similarly, in the 1960s, many doubted that gene-cloning technologies could so easily shuttle genes between species. By 1980, making a mammalian protein in a bacterial cell, or a bacterial protein in a mammalian cell, was not just feasible, it was in Berg's words, rather 'ridiculously simple.' Species were specious. 'Being natural' was often 'just a pose.","author":"Siddhartha Mukherjee","tags":["balance","double-edged-sword","genetics","genomics","inspirational","modern-genetics","technology"],"id":203746,"author_id":"Siddhartha+Mukherjee"},{"text":"Intelligence...[is] not marathon rac[e]: there is no fixed criteria for success, no start or finish lines -- and running sideways or backwards, might secure victory.","author":"Siddhartha Mukherjee","tags":["intelligence"],"id":209418,"author_id":"Siddhartha+Mukherjee"},{"text":"Emblematic of this era was the prolific Viennese surgeon Theodor Billroth. Born in 1821, Billroth studied music and surgery with almost equal verve. (The professions still often go hand in hand. Both push manual skill to its limit; both mature with practice and age; both depend on immediacy, precision, and opposable thumbs.).","author":"Siddhartha Mukherjee","tags":["humor","medicine","music"],"id":223502,"author_id":"Siddhartha+Mukherjee"},{"text":"Scientists divide. We discriminate. It is the inevitable occupational hazard of our profession that we must break the world into its constituent parts -- genes, atoms, bytes -- before making it whole again. We know of no other mechanism to understand the world: to create the sum of its parts, we must begin by dividing it into the parts of the sum.","author":"Siddhartha Mukherjee","tags":["science","understanding"],"id":225721,"author_id":"Siddhartha+Mukherjee"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":30,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}