In his early years as an oncologist, Siddhartha Mukherjee, '93, remembers thinking that his perspective was only part of the story. "My experiences were part of a much larger battle against cancer," he writes, "but its contours lay far outside my reach. I had a novice's hunger for history, but also a novice's inability to envision it."
Setting out to envision it, he researched a readable and sweeping "biography" of cancer, which causes one-fourth of American deaths. The Emperor of All Maladies (Scribner), became one of the most honored books of 2010 and, most recently, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.
Mukherjee, a Rhodes scholar and Harvard med graduate after he earned a biology degree at Stanford, is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia. His research focuses on blood-forming stem cells in bone marrow.
Emperor looks with equal intensity at the history of cancer, with vivid portraits of figures like researcher Sidney Farber and advocate Mary Lasker, and at its future, where the widening genetic understanding of cancer holds promise for treatment options as revolutionary as surgery, radiation and chemotherapy have been.
