Siddhartha Mukherjee
Siddhartha Mukherjee (born July 21, 1970, New Delhi, India) is an Indian-born American oncologist and writer celebrated for his effort to demystify cancer with his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010). The work was published to wide acclaim and later formed the basis of the American film documentary Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies (2015).
Mukherjee attended St. Columba’s, a Roman Catholic school in New Delhi, afterward traveling to the United States, where in 1993 he received a B.S. in biology from Stanford University. He studied as a Rhodes scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, completing a D.Phil. in immunology in 1996 before returning to the United States for medical studies at Harvard University. After earning an M.D. in 2000, Mukherjee trained in internal medicine and oncology as a fellow at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital.
From 2009, as an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, Mukherjee investigated hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), the precursors of the cellular components of blood. Dysregulated activation of HSCs from a quiescent state was suspected of contributing to the development of various blood malignancies. Mukherjee’s team worked to identify and characterize genes that regulate HSC quiescence and to identify molecules that could serve as novel targets for anticancer drugs. He and his collaborators discovered compounds that were capable of blocking the activity of leukemia stem cells and found that osteoblasts (bone-forming cells that regulate HSC function) play a critical role in encouraging the development of leukemia in the bone marrow.
Mukherjee conceived of the idea to write The Emperor of All Maladies after realizing that despite decades of research, cancer remained an enigmatic disease. In the book Mukherjee traced cancer from its earliest recorded history to its fate in the modern era of targeted therapy. The book was celebrated for its eloquent and moving portrayal of patients affected by the disease, particularly descriptions of how their determination to survive was fundamental to furthering the understanding of cancer. The work was listed among the All-Time 100 Nonfiction Books (Time magazine’s picks for the top 100 nonfiction works in English since 1923). Shortly after the book was published, film rights were obtained by Laura Ziskin, a film producer and a cofounder of the organization Stand Up to Cancer. American filmmakers Barak Goodman and Ken Burns later made the documentary, which consisted of three two-hour-long episodes.
In Mukherjee’s next major work, The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science (2015), he outlined the little-known precepts that govern medicine and concluded that an understanding of those precepts can enhearten patients as well as the medical community. The Gene: An Intimate History (2016) plumbs the history of genetic research as well as that of Mukherjee’s own family, which had a history of mental illness.
For his contributions to science, Mukherjee was awarded the 2014 Padma Shri, one of India’s highest civilian honours.