Public Lecture + Book Signing with author Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
7:30 pm
Victoria Inn Embassy Ballroom
Siddhartha Mukherjee – a gifted physician and writer brings new insights into the causes and cures of cancer.
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
· 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
· a New York Times Best Book of 2010
· Time magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book
Reviews
“Mukherjee’s debut book is a sweeping epic of obsession, brilliant researchers, dramatic new treatments, euphoric success and tragic failure, and the relentless battle by scientists and patients alike against an equally relentless, wily, and elusive enemy.”— Publishers Weekly starred review
“An extraordinary achievement.” —The New Yorker
“Mukherjee’s profound compassion – for cancer patients, their families, as well as the oncologists who, all too often, can offer little hope – makes this book a very human history of an elusive and complicated disease.” —Amazon.com review
Credentials
· Assistant Professor of Medicine, Columbia University
· Staff Cancer Physician, Columbia/NYU Presbyterian Hospital
· Fellow, Dana Farber Cancer Institute
· Attending Physician, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School
· Rhodes Scholar
· PhD, Immunology, Oxford University
· MD, Harvard Medical School
· BS, Stanford University
Short Bio
A cancer specialist, Sid, as he is known to his friends, has devoted his life to caring for victims of cancer, a disease that sickens and kills millions of people around the world each year. As a researcher, his laboratory is at the forefront of discovering new cancer drugs using innovative biological methods.
Ten years in the making, Dr. Mukherjee’s engrossing book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, is a magnificent narrative-driven biography of a shape-shifting and formidable disease that has plagued and riddled humanity for thousands of years. Sid gives readers a fascinating look into the origins and causes of cancer, its deadly effect on the human body, how it has virtually enveloped modern civilization, and the epic battles that are taking place to control, cure, and conquer it.
As Sid notes, cancer now touches in some way the lives of every man, woman and child in the world, while scientists and physicians work tirelessly to bring new treatments and hope to its victims.
Dr. Mukherjee has been published in Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Neuron, Journal of Clinical Investigation, The New York Times, and The New Republic. His work was nominated for inclusion in Best American Science Writing, 2000.
Sid’s words on the stage and on the page are powerful, illuminating, and inspiring.
From the first known reference to cancer on an ancient Egyptian scroll to the epic modern battles to conquer it, Mukherjee approaches this crucial subject with the passion and fixation of a biographer and the flourish of a novelist. The Emperor of All Maladies is a story that touches on the brilliance and tenacity that frequently make scientific history—and also on the serendipitous discoveries.
Mukherjee introduces audiences to key figures such as Sidney Farber, the father of modern chemotherapy, holed up in the cellar of a Boston hospital and characterized by a colleague as a “cancer maniac,” and William Halsted, bewhiskered, obsessive, and addicted to cocaine, who created and perfected the radical and super-radical mastectomies that became the norm in cases of breast cancer for decades. Readers learn about the accidental discovery during World War I of mustard gas as a method for killing cancer cells, and from there the experimental evolution into the specialized chemicals that are just deadly enough to kill cancerous cells without killing normal cells.
Mukherjee tells these stories with the grand sweep that marks The Emperor of All Maladies as a work of major literature, seamlessly weaving significant moments in cultural history into the narrative. It is also something more personal: audiences will be moved by Mukherjee’s observations about his own coming of age as a physician—especially in his thoughtful and compassionate consideration of his patients as they soldier through toxic, bruising, and draining regimens to battle a relentless disease that fully envelops their lives.
In the past 50 years, Americans have watched as various strategies in the “War on Cancer” have earned the attention of politicians, physicians, media and, of course, the public. By the end of 2010, cancer is projected to become the leading cause of death worldwide. Cases of cancer doubled globally between 1975 and 2000, and will double again by 2020, nearly tripling by 2030. In America, one in two men and one in three women will get cancer during their lifetime; one in four will die. Mukherjee and The Emperor of All Maladies could not deliver a more timely message, and he presents it with such clarity and verve that audiences will feel enlightened, even uplifted, despite those grim figures.
A Rhodes Scholar, Mukherjee graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School, and was a Fellow at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and an attending physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He has published articles in Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Neuron, Journal of Clinical Investigation, The New York Times, and The New Republic. He lives in New York with his wife and daughters.
Anishnawbe elders talk about good health or the 'good life': mino-bimadzi-win. They encourage us to find a balance of the mind, body and spirit to lead a good life.
.JPG)
No comments:
Post a Comment