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.
Bone formation Mukherjee's team is also known for defining and characterizing skeletal stem/progenitor cells (also called osteochondroreticular or OCR cells). In 2015, they prospectively identified these progenitor cells from bone, and showed, using lineage tracing, that these cells can give rise to bone, cartilage, and reticular cells (hence the term "OCR" cells). They established that these cells form a part of the adult skeleton in vertebrates, and that they maintain and repair the skeleton.
OCR cells are among the newest progenitor cells to be defined in vertebrates. The work generated wide interest and was described in journals as a major breakthrough for understanding biology and for understanding diseases such as osteoporosis and osteoarthritis. Mukherjee's team have shown that OCR cells can be transplanted into animals, and they can regenerate cartilage and bone after fractures. With Daniel L. Worthley's team at the University of Adelaide and South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute they have been working on the translational cell-based research on osteoarthritis and cancer.
Metabolic therapies for cancer Mukherjee's lab has also been investigating the interaction between cancer genetics and the microenvironment, including the metabolic environment. It has been well established that metabolism in cancer is fundamentally altered, Mukherjee's team has found the role of a high-fat, adequate-protein, low-carbohydrate diet (ketogenic diet) in cancer therapy. They showed that ketogenic diet suppressed insulin production in the body, and this in turn enhances pharmaceutical inhibition of PIK3CA, a gene which is mutated and commonly overactive in cancers.
Immune therapies for acute leukemia Mukherjee's lab, with the help of PureTech Health plc, has been investigating chimeric antigen receptor redirected T cells (CAR-T) therapy in a joint venture called Vor BioPharma since 2016. They have combined CAR-T therapies with genetically modified hematopoietic stem cells to specifically target malignant hematopoietic lineages, while transplanted stem cells replenish the lineage but remain antigenically concealed. This technology has been developed so that, in addition to B cell malignancies, other lineage specific cancers could be targeted. This provides an important new approach to managing acute myeloid leukemia.
Books In 2010, Simon & Schuster published his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer detailing the evolution of diagnosis and treatment of human cancers from ancient Egypt to the latest developments in chemotherapy and targeted therapy. On 18 April 2011, the book won the annual Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction; the citation called it "an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science.""The 2011 Pulitzer Prize Winners: General Nonfiction". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 12 November 2013. It was listed in the "All-Time 100 Nonfiction Books" (the 100 most influential books of the last century) and the "Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2010" by Time in 2011. It was also listed in "The 10 Best Books of 2010" by The New York Times and "Top 10 Books of 2010" by O, The Oprah Magazine. In 2011, it was nominated as a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.
Based on the book, Ken Burns made the PBS documentary Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies (2015). which was nominated for an Emmy Award.
He followed it with The Gene: An Intimate History (2016). It is a history of genetics from Gregor Mendel to Jennifer Doudna. It also delves into the personal genetic history of Mukherjee's family, including mental illness. The book discusses the power of genetics in determining people's health and attributes, but it also has a cautionary tone to not let genetic predispositions define fate, a mentality that led to the rise of eugenics in history and something he thinks lacks the nuance required to understand something as complex as human beings. Harriet Hall describes Emperor and The Gene as "the story of science itself". The Gene was shortlisted for the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize 2016, "the Nobel Prize of science writing." The book was also the recipient of the 2017 Phi Beta Kappa Society Book Award in Science.
Burns made a two-part PBS documentary, The Gene: An Intimate History in 2020.
In his book The Song of the Cell, published in 2022, Mukherjee describes the history and medical mystery from the discovery of cell. Narrated in metaphors, many of which he created, such as "gunslinging sheriff" for antibody and "gumshoe detective" to T cell, he tells the development of cell biology and how it became vital to modern medicine, from genetic engineering to immunotherapies. Suzanne O'Sullivan, reviewing in The Guardian, explains the book as a tool for "the reader to imagine they are an astronaut investigating the cell as if it is an unknown spacecraft".
Criticism and response