Vishesh Jain

“Like Bennett, Virchow didn't understand leukemia. But unlike Bennett, he didn't pretend to understand it. His insight lay entirely in the negative. By wiping the slate clean of all preconceptions, he cleared the field for thought.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“The biological universe was full of molecules picking out their partners like clever locks designed to fit a key: toxins clinging inseparably to antitoxins, dyes that highlighted only particular parts of cells, chemical stains that could nimbly pick out one class of germs from a mixture of microbes. If biology was an elaborate mix-and-match game of chemicals, Ehrlich reasoned, what if some chemical could discriminate bacterial cells from animal cells--and kill the former without touching the host?”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“Instead of trying to tailor the disease to fit his medicine, Kaplan learned to tailor his medicine to fit the right disease. This simple principle--the meticulous matching of a particular therapy to a particular form and stage of cancer--would eventually be given its due merit in cancer therapy.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“How might a drug coursing through the whole body specifically attack a diseased organ?”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer