India-born Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee has made his country of birth proud by winning the prestigious Pulitzer Prize 2011 for General Non-fiction.
His Book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (published last year) has unraveled the history of the disease from Egyptian civilisation to current chemotherapy and covered the legislative moves in the US, which seems to be half-hearted in providing an infrastructure to battle the disease.
Dr Mukherjee has rich accolades around the world for his Book, which was on Time Magazine’s Top 10 Non-Fiction Books 2010 and The New York Times List of Top Five Books. Time named him in its list of ‘100 Most Influential People’ this year.
Pulitzer Prize was established in 1917 in the name of Hungarian-American Publisher Joseph Pulitzer initially to recognise achievers in Newspaper Journalism and Music Composition but later expanded to include 21 categories.
Among the notable Pulitzer winners of Indian origin in the past are Gobind Behari Lal for Journalism (1937), Jhumpa Lahiri for Fiction (2000) and Geeta Anand for Journalism (2003).
Born in 1970 in Delhi, Dr Mukherjee studied at St Columbia School and left for the US to major in Biology at Stanford University. He later won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at the Oxford University and obtained his doctorate in Immunology. He also attended the Harvard Medical School to train as an internist and won an Oncology fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital.
Dr Mukherjee is now Assistant Professor of Medicine at Medicine (Oncology) Department, Columbia University in New York City besides being a Staff Cancer Physician at Columbia University Medical Center.
