Siddhartha Mukherjee (born 21 July 1970) is an Indian-American physician, cancer researcher and author. His first book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 and has been translated into dozens of languages. He is a professor of medicine at Columbia University in New York.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Siddhartha Mukherjee |
| Born | 21 July 1970, New Delhi, India |
| Age | 56 |
| Nationality | American (born Indian) |
| Education | St Columba’s School, Delhi; Stanford University (B.S., 1993); Magdalen College, Oxford (D.Phil., Rhodes Scholar); Harvard Medical School (M.D., 2000) |
| Occupation | Oncologist, researcher, author |
| Notable works | The Emperor of All Maladies, The Gene, The Song of the Cell |
| Awards | Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction (2011), Padma Shri (2014) |
| Spouse | Sarah Sze |
| Children | 2 |
Early Life
He was born in New Delhi into a Bengali family. His father, Sibeswar, worked for the Japanese company Mitsubishi, and his mother, Chandana, had been a schoolteacher in Calcutta. He grew up in the Safdarjung Enclave neighbourhood and studied at St Columba’s School, where he won the school’s highest award.
Two of his father’s brothers and a cousin suffered from serious mental illness, a family history that he later made the starting point of his book on genetics.
Education
He went to Stanford University, where he studied biology and worked in the laboratory of the Nobel laureate Paul Berg. As a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford he took a doctorate in immunology. He then studied medicine at Harvard, and trained in internal medicine and oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
Career
Physician and scientist
He joined Columbia University in 2009. His laboratory studies blood-forming stem cells and the cells of bone and cartilage, and looks for new treatments for leukaemia and other cancers. He has co-founded several biotechnology companies, including Immuneel in Bengaluru, set up with Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw to make advanced cell therapies for cancer affordable in India.
Books
- The Emperor of All Maladies (2010): a history of cancer from an Egyptian papyrus to modern targeted drugs, told through the stories of scientists and of his own patients. He began it to answer a patient who asked what exactly she was fighting. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a television documentary series produced by Ken Burns in 2015.
- The Laws of Medicine (2015)
- The Gene: An Intimate History (2016): the story of heredity from Mendel to gene editing
- The Song of the Cell (2022): on the cell as the unit of life and of the new medicine
He also writes for The New Yorker and The New York Times.
Recognition
India awarded him the Padma Shri in 2014. Time magazine listed him among the hundred most influential people in the world in 2011.
Personal Life
He is married to the American artist Sarah Sze, who has represented the United States at the Venice Biennale; they have two daughters and live in New York. He trained as a singer of Hindustani classical music in his youth.
Featured image: Siddhartha Mukherjee delivering a lecture at the University of Texas at Austin, April 2017. Photo by Moody College of Communication, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.