Entrepreneurship

Pulitzer Prize winner, cancer expert Siddhartha Mukherjee on his upcoming books, dislike for social media and love for writing

Updated : September 16, 2019 02:49 PM IST

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a busy man. The Delhi-born haematologist is a cancer physician, researcher and assistant professor at Columbia University.

Mukherjee is also the author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction, and The Laws of Medicine.

Pulitzer Prize winner, cancer expert Siddhartha Mukherjee on his upcoming books, dislike for social media and love for writing

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a busy man. The Delhi-born haematologist is a cancer physician, researcher and assistant professor at Columbia University.

Mukherjee is also the author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction, and The Laws of Medicine.

The Emperor of All Maladies tells the story of cancer from its first description in an ancient Egyptian scroll to the gleaming laboratories of modern research institutions.

And now the 49-year old author is set to launch two new books, which will dwell on medicine and immortality.

"There are two books in the works, very broadly speaking one of them will address the history of medicine and very broadly speaking the other will address questions of immortality, our search for immortality digital, social and other," Mukherjee told CNBC-TV18 in an exclusive interview.

A Rhodes scholar, who graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford and Harvard Medical School, Mukherjee has published articles in Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times, and Cell.

While writing books, Mukherjee follows a set of rules about how to structure the chapters and so on, but has the process changed over the years?

"It has been very much the same. My writing process begins with a lot of research and reading, it begins in a very close space. I need silence, I need a lot of time to think and then it comes out as a work," said Mukherjee, who spends at least a couple of hours writing every day.

Not surprisingly, Mukherjee, who lives in Manhattan with his wife, artist Sarah Sze, and their two daughters, are all big readers. The family tend to hit bookstores on Sunday afternoons to buy books to add to their collection.

Mukherjee doesn't have a television at home, allowing the family to spend their quality time reading. He is also not a big social buff. Except for Twitter, the author hardly uses any networking websites.

"I am on Twitter, it is the only social media that I use and I use it quite sparingly. I don’t find using anything less particularly inspiring. I like to talk to people directly," revealed Mukherjee.

"I like traditional news, I like the long-form news and I have never found that joy that some people find in connecting through social media. But I am the dinosaur, clearly, there are other people - I like reading newspaper."

Mukherjee adorns many hats, making it difficult for his readers and followers to distinguish one from the other.

"People say are you doctor or a writer or are you both or are you a scientist or a writer. I make no distinctions. I think to write, sometimes writing generates a new idea that idea might go into the laboratory, it might come back from the laboratory and become part of the book. It is all part of the same sort of larger and I make no distinctions, the windows are open on all sides."

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Pulitzer Prize winner, cancer expert Siddhartha Mukherjee on his upcoming books, dislike for social media and love for writing

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