Siddhartha Mukherjee: explaining cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee: explaining cancer

Just who is Siddhartha Mukherjee? This is the question many veterans of the cancer community asked as a book by this unknown author began to win critical accolades and prizes last year, including the Pulitzer Prize for non-Fiction and the Guardian First Book Award, earning Mukherjee a place among TIME magazine's 100 most influential people.
 
Less than two years since publication, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer has sold between half a million and a million copies, is being translated into 20 languages, and continues to generate around 50 emails to the author a day. "I was completely overwhelmed by the generosity of the response," says Mukherjee, currently a practising oncologist specialising in haematological cancers at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. "By the size of it, by how diverse it is, by how diffuse it is. From students and general lay readers who said 'I was never interested in this question till I read the book,' to scientists at the National Institutes of Health who write thanking me for providing an overview. Different people come at it in different ways. For some people it gives them solace, for some it activates them. Young men and women write and say 'I now want to be a scientist, a cancer researcher'. This happens literally every day." His celebrity status is such that he was even approached by a group of students while on a trip with his kids to Disneyland. 

Reading Mukherjee's own biographical notes will tell you that he reached his current position as assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, in charge of a translational research lab at the University's Irving Cancer Research Center, through an academic research route, with the clinical practice coming only later. Born and educated in New Delhi, India, he went on to major in biology at Stanford University, California, where he worked in Nobel Laureate Paul Berg's laboratory defining cellular genes that change the behaviours of cancer cells. A Rhodes Scholarship took him to Oxford, where he earned a DPhil in immunology. Only then did he train as an MD at Harvard Medical School, where he completed his residency in internal medicine followed by an oncology fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. 

His research focuses on the links between normal stem cells and cancer cells, specifically probing the microenvironment of stem cells – particularly blood-forming stem cells. It has attracted grants from many sources including a coveted Challenge Grant from the National Institutes for Health, and generated papers published in journals including Nature, Neuron and the Journal of Clinical Investigation. 

Mukherjee, then, could be summed up as one of the new generation of translational researchers who is exploring one of many interesting avenues that may offer new opportunities for intervening in processes that generate and fuel certain types of cancer growth. 

None of this, however, offers a clue as to why he ended up b...

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