Siddhartha Mukherjee (Bengali: সিদ্ধার্থ মুখার্জী; born 21 July 1970) is an Indian physician, biologist, and author. His first book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010), won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and Guardian First Book Award, among other awards. It was listed in the "All-Time 100 Nonfiction Books" (the 100 most influential books of the last century) by Time magazine in 2011. He followed it with The Gene: An Intimate History (2016), which was among The New York Times 100 best books of 2016, and a finalist for the Wellcome Trust Prize and the Royal Society Prize for Science Books. He won the 2019 Lewis Thomas Prize. After completing secondary school education in India, Mukherjee studied biology at Stanford University, obtained a D.Phil. from University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and an M.D. from Harvard University. He joined New York–Presbyterian Hospital / Columbia University Medical Center in New York City in 2009. As of 2018, he is an associate professor of medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology. Featured in the Time 100 list of most influential people in 2011, Mukherjee writes for The New Yorker and is a columnist in The New York Times. He is described as part of a select group of doctor-writers (such as Oliver Sacks and Atul Gawande) who have "transformed the public discourse on human health," and allowed a generation of readers a rare and intimate glimpse into the life of science and medicine. His research concerns the physiology of cancer cells, immunological therapy for blood cancers, and the discovery of bone- and cartilage-forming stem cells in the vertebrate skeleton. The government of India conferred on him its fourth highest civilian award, the Padma Shri, in 2014.
Early life and education Siddhartha Mukherjee was born to a Bengali Brahmin family in New Delhi, India. His father, Sibeswar Mukherjee, was an executive with Mitsubishi, and his mother Chandana Mukherjee, was a former school teacher from Calcutta (now Kolkata). He attended St. Columba's School in Delhi, where he won the school's highest award, the 'Sword of Honour', in 1989. As a biology major at Stanford University, he worked in Nobel Laureate Paul Berg's laboratory, defining cellular genes that change the behaviours of cancer cells. He earned membership in Phi Beta Kappa in 1992, and completed his bachelor of science (BS) degree in 1993. Mukherjee won a Rhodes Scholarship for doctoral research at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. He worked on the mechanism of activation of the immune system by viral antigens. He was awarded a DPhil in 1997 for his thesis titled The Processing and Presentation of Viral Antigens. After graduation, he attended Harvard Medical School, where he earned his doctor of medicine (MD) degree in 2000. Between 2000 and 2003 he worked as a resident in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital. From 2003 to 2006 he trained in hematology-oncology as a fellow at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute (under Harvard Medical School) in Boston, Massachusetts.
Career In 2009, Mukherjee joined the faculty of the Department of Medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at the Columbia University Medical Center as an assistant professor. The medical center is attached to the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. He was previously affiliated with the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and with Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He has worked as the Plummer Visiting professor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, the Joseph Garland lecturer at the Massachusetts Medical Society, and an honorary visiting professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. His laboratory is based at Columbia University's Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center. In January 2025, Mukherjee launched Manas AI, an AI-enabled drug discovery startup, together with Reid Hoffman, with about $25 million in venture capital funding.
Contributions
Cancer research Mukherjee is a trained hematologist and oncologist whose research focuses on the links between normal stem cells and cancer cells. Through his findings, he had shown the roles of cells in cancer therapy. He has been investigating the microenvironment ("niche") of stem cells, particularly on blood-forming (haematopoietic) stem cells. Blood-forming stem cells are present in the bone marrow in very specific microenvironments. Osteoblasts, cells that form bone, are one of the principal components in this environment. These cells regulate the process of blood cell formation and development by providing them with signals to divide, remain quiescent, or maintain their stem cell properties. Distortion in the development of these cells results in severe blood cancers, such as myelodysplastic syndrome and leukemia. Mukherjee's research has been recognised through many grants from the National Institutes of Health and from private foundations. Mukherjee and his co-workers have identified several genes and chemicals that can alter the microenvironment, or niche, and thereby alter the behavior of normal stem cells, as well as cancer cells. Two such chemicals—proteasome inhibitors and activin inhibitors—are under clinical trials. Mukherjee's lab has also identified novel genetic mutations in myelodysplasia and acute myelogenous leukaemia and has played a leading role in finding therapies for these diseases.
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