Siddharta Muckergee is an Indian-born American physician and author. He was born on this day, July 21 in the year 1970 in New Delhi, India. After finishing his bachelor’s degree in biology at Stanford University, he went to Magdalen College, University of Oxford where he was granted a PhD. for working on the mechanism of activation of the immune system by viral antigens. In 2000, he graduated from Harvard Medical School, earning a degree in Medicine.

In 2010, his book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” was published. The following year, he received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and his book was included in the “Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2010” by Time. The same magazine included him in Time 100 most influential people in 2011. In 2016, he published his book “The Gene: An Intimate History” and earned for him the 2017 Phi Beta Kappa Society Book Award in Science.

Mukherjee is married to artist Sarah Sze and they have 2 kids.

Here are some of his thought-provoking statements:

“I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read.”

“Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery.”

“History repeats, but science reverberates.”

“Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.”

“If something is good, more is not necessarily better. Not always.”

“I think when we use ‘stress’, we are often using a kind of dummy word to try to fit many different things into one big category.”

“Cancer is not one disease but many diseases.”

“There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression.”

“A positive attitude does not cure cancer, any more than a negative one causes it.”

“Pharmacology is benefited by the prepared mind. You need to know what you are looking for.”

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