HMS alumnus Siddhartha Mukherjee wins Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction

Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D. '00, is honored for The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

Joining a long and notable list of Harvard-affiliated physicians whose skill with words has enabled them to educate audiences far beyond their immediate circles of patients and colleagues, Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D. '00, has been awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for a work of general nonfiction for his book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner). The Pulitzer judges praised the work as “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science.”

Mukherjee is currently an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University; his lab "works on acute myeloid leukemia and pre-leukemic diseases, such as myelodysplasia (MDS)," seeking to “understand the pathogenesis of AML and MDS in order to develop novel drugs” against them.

 

Profiles from our archives of Atul Gawande and Jerome Groopman offer introductions to other Harvard-affiliated physician-authors. 

You might also like

Graduates John Lithgow, Bill Rauch, and Bess Wohl took home prizes on Sunday night.

Singer Elisa Smith’s whiskey-soaked voice and subversive feminism is part of the genre’s urban shift.

Harvard graduate and NASCAR racer Patrick Staropoli on pedals, attention, and fearlessness.

Most popular

Harvard's budget balances, benefits cuts divisive

A University financial surplus, but tensions over reductions in employee health benefits

An animal’s journey from grief to love shows how much humans need each other, too.

There’s a growing movement to curb light pollution. It starts on your front porch.

Explore More From Current Issue

Star-filled night sky with the Milky Way arching over a rocky silhouette.

There’s a growing movement to curb light pollution. It starts on your front porch.

Harvey Mansfield seated in a bright yellow chair, surrounded by bookshelves and cozy decor.

The retired government professor has been a rare conservative voice on campus for decades.

A profile illustration of a man surrounded by colorful, whimsical text in multiple languages.

For both American and international students, growing up is like learning a new language.