Siddhartha Mukherjee

They are more perfect versions of ourselves

The link was correct, but the causality was not: civilization did not cause cancer, but by extending human life spans—civilization unveiled it.

few years later, Ehrlich found that certain toxins, injected into animals, could generate “antitoxins,” which bound and inactivated poisons with extraordinary specificity (these antitoxins would later be identified as antibodies

The biological universe was full of molecules picking out their partners like clever locks designed to fit a key:

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?

diseases were just pathological locks waiting to be picked by the right molecules.

was like the meeting of two stranded travelers, each carrying one-half of a map.

Like all cells, bacteria need to replicate DNA in order to divide. Cisplatin had chemically attacked DNA with its reactive molecular arms, cross-linking and damaging the molecule irreparably, forcing cells to arrest their division.

Cell division allows us as organisms to grow, to adapt, to recover, to repair—to live. And distorted and unleashed, it allows cancer cells to grow, to flourish, to adapt, to recover, and to repair—to live at the cost of our living. Cancer cells grow faster, adapt better. They are more perfect versions of ourselves.

(This was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation.)