Physician and author, Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee, 52, will be the guest at the Express Adda on Monday. He will be in conversation with Anant Goenka, Executive Director, The Indian Express Group, and DevyaniOnial, National Features Editor.
AS SOMEONE who has demystified and humanised public discourse on medicine and health with his empathetic writing, Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee is familiar to many as the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010), and The Gene: An Intimate History (2016). But the New York-based Mukherjee is also a noted haematologist and oncologist, whose recently published third work of non-fiction, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human (Allen Lane), takes off from the study of the fundamental unit of life – the cell – and leads readers through the integral role it plays in medical science.
Physician and author, Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee, 52, will be the guest at the Express Adda on Monday. He will be in conversation with Anant Goenka, Executive Director, The Indian Express Group, and DevyaniOnial, National Features Editor.
In The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Mukherjee quotes Hippocrates: “The art of medicine is long, and life is short; opportunity fleeting; the experiment perilous; judgment flawed.” But if anything, it has motivated the haematologist and oncologist to power on in his research that focuses on the link between stem cells and cancer cells. Mukherjee’s recent initiative in Bengaluru, Immuneel Therapeutic Ltd, in collaboration with biotech entrepreneur Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, has been rolling out a crucial clinical trial on the treatment of cancer, called the Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, already in use in several countries, that will significantly bring down the cost of therapy for patients in India.
Born in a Bengali family in New Delhi, Mukherjee attended St Columba’s School, where he won the school’s highest award, the ‘Sword of Honour’, in 1989. He went on to study biology at Stanford University, where he worked in Nobel Laureate Paul Berg’s laboratory, defining cellular genes that change the behaviours of cancer cells. He then moved to the University of Oxford, after winning the Rhodes Scholarship for doctoral research into viral antigens. Afterwards, he moved back to the US, where he attended Harvard Medical School, earning his Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) degree in 2000. Currently, Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, New York City.
The Express Adda is a series of informal interactions organised by The Indian Express Group and features those at the centre of change. Past guests at the event include Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, the Dalai Lama, economists and Nobel laureates Amartya Sen, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, world badminton champion P V Sindhu and national badminton coach Pullela Gopichand, actor Pankaj Tripathi and others.
