Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha Mukherjee won the Pulitzer prize 2011 in the general nonfiction category for his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. Mukherjee is currently serving as Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Columbia University in New York City and is also a staff cancer physician at the Columbia University Medical Center. [caption id="attachment_2456" align="alignleft" width="380" caption="Siddhartha Mukherjee at Jaipur Literary Festival held in January 2011. Sam Panthaky/AFP Photos"][/caption]His book is both a historical narrative of the evolution of diagnoses of cancer and its treatment, and his up-close and personal encounters with it – as a doctor, a researcher and someone who lost both his parents to the disease; his wife is receiving radiotherapy for breast cancer. “Cancer really is all around,” he writes in an article in the New Statesman.The book, he says in an interview in OncLive, is an answer to a question put to him by an abdominal cancer patient in Boston, who had relapsed after chemotherapy, was treated again, but succumbed to the disease. “At one point, she said, ‘Well, I’m willing to go on, but in order to go on I need to know what it is I’m battling’,” he says.Mukherjee made it to the list of Time magazine's list of influential people 2011. The Emperor of All Maladies made it to the list of top 10 books of 2010 on The Oprah Magazine, the New York Times and figured in Time magazine’s list of top 10 nonfiction books.Born in 1970 in New Delhi, raised in Safdarjung Enclave, Mukherjee currently lives in New York. He majored in biology at Stanford, went on a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford where he got a PhD in immunology. He attended Harvard Medical School and won oncology fellowship at Massachussetts. As a researcher, his laboratory is on the forefront of discovering new cancer drugs using innovative biological methods.