"Varmus and Bishop were awarded the nobel Prize for their discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes in 1989. At the banquet in Stockholm, Varmus, recalling his former life as a student of literature, read lines from the epic poem Beowulf, recapitulating slaying the dragon in that story: 'We have not slain our enemy, the cancer cell, or figuratively torn the limbs from his body,' Varmus said. 'In our adventures, we have only seen our monster more clearly and describe his scales and fangs in new ways--ways that reveal a cancer cell to be, like Grendel, a distorted version of our normal selves.'"
"Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book." -John Green, The Fault In Our Stars.
"Monsters make such interesting people." -Bugs Bunny
Who says there are no such things as monsters? I say they are everywhere. But we are not powerless. We have an incredibly powerful weapon with which to fight each and every one. That weapon is language. "A word after a word after a word is power."- Margaret Atwood.
I cannot wait to get started on this book with all of you on Sept. 4. We are going to do so much with it. There is so much to learn from what Mukherjee has synthesized and the ways in which he has chosen to do so. There is much to emulate. Again, I can't wait.
I'm a little behind the blog but I'm catching up!
ReplyDeleteA golden line: "Yet, old sins have long shadows, and carcinogenic sins especially so." (Mukherjee 272)
This could be referencing the powers of light and dark, an allusion to the bible, guilt, or simply the weakness of human will.
Woot! Just finished the book. I liked the ending! My golden line was: "Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark tells us the story of a motley crew of hunters that launch an agonizing journey to trap a deranged, invisible creature called the Snark... Varmus and Bishop set off to understand the origins of the src gene... Other scientists nicknamed the project 'the hunting of the sarc'" (Mukharjee 360)
ReplyDeleteIsn't that a great feeling, Sharath? So many literary allusions!
ReplyDeleteYes it is. Now I'm going back and seeing if I can make a list of the scientists that made discoveries/were mentioned for their feats. I'm only a hundred pages in and I have about 20 people already.
DeleteI like your golden line, Sharath. I saw the monster theme really come together in this section. I feel like this book is almost like the description of science on page 362: "an iterative and cumulative process, a puzzle solved piece by piece, with each piece contributing a few hazy pixels of a much larger picture" (362). Mukherjee is brilliant at tying all the bits and pieces of the story of cancer together into one cohesive picture.
ReplyDeleteOn page 397, Mukherjee tells of an Italian memoirist named Primo Levi, who survived the Nazi regime in a concentration camp, then navigated through Germany to return to his home- and he said that "among the most fatal qualities of the camp was its ability to erase the idea of a life outside and beyond itself."
ReplyDeleteThis summer I went the Theresienstadt, the concentration camp of Terezín, about an hour and half away from Prague. While there, I sang poetry written by the children who lived there and either died there or were sent to Auschwitz. I performed these songs on the stage where Nazis held executions- for inmates to see as examples. I strongly identify with this passage- because yes, concentration camps erased the pasts of those who lived there, the inmates forgot what it was to be free. Mukherjee's parallel here, to cancer as a sort of camp where terror becomes the normal, is potentially one of the most moving passages in the entire novel for me. Perhaps not for others, but I certainly know that people who have seen concentration camps or had similar experiences will sympathize. Brilliant use of emotional appeal here, I think.
Nice connection, Emily. I like the fact that Mukherjee returns to this comparison--Cancer as a kind of prison--several times throughout the work.
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