Siddhartha Mukherjee Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Best American Science and Nature Writing Books

Siddhartha Mukherjee
Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer researcher and physician. He’s an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia and a staff cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Center. He writes for The New Yorker and is a columnist in The New York Times, and has had articles published in The New England Journal of Medicine, The New Republic, and Nature.

He was born in New Delhi, India on July 21, 1970 to a Bengali Brahmin family. His dad (Sibeswar) was an executive with Mitsubishi, and his mom (Chandana Mukherjee) was a former school teacher from Calcutta.

He went to St. Columba’s School in Delhi, where he won the ‘Sword of Honour’ the school’s highest award. While at Stanford, as a biology major, he worked in Nobel Laureate Paul Berg’s laboratory, defining cellular genes which change the behaviors of cancer cells. In 1992, he earned membership in Phi Beta Kappa, and completed his Bachelor of Science degree in 1993.

After he completed secondary school education in India, he studied biology at Stanford University. He obtained a D. Phil. from University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, working on the mechanism of activation of the immune system by viral antigens. Siddhartha wrote his thesis called “The processing and presentation of viral antigens. He received an MD from Harvard University in 2000. Siddhartha joined New York-Presbyterian Hospital/ Columbia University Medical Center in New York City in the year 2009.

Between 2000 and 2003, he worked as a resident in internal medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital. From 2003 to 2006 he trained in oncology as a Fellow at the Dana-Faber Cancer Institute (under Harvard Medical School) in Boston.

“The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” won notable literary prizes including the Guardian First Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, among others. It was listed in the “All Time 100 Nonfiction Books” by Time Magazine in 2011. Time also featured him in their Time 100 list of most influential people. O, The Oprah Magazine and The New York Times each listed the book in their Top Ten Best Books of the Year list. “The Gene: An Intimate History” was a finalist for the Royal Society Prize for Science Books and the Wellcome Trust Prize. The Government of India conferred on him the Padma Shri, its fourth highest civilian award, in 2014.

He was described as part of this select group of doctor-writers (which includes Atul Gawande and Oliver Sacks) that have transformed the public discourse on human health, and have allowed an entire generation of readers this intimate and rare glimpse into the life of medicine and science.

“The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2010. This is a profoundly humane and magnificent “biography” of cancer, from its first documented appearances thousands of years prior through the epic battles in the twentieth century to control, cure, and conquer it to a radical new comprehension of its total essence.

Siddhartha examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a biographer’s passion, and a historian’s point of view. What results from this is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease that humans have lived with, and also perished from, for over five thousand years.

The story of cancer is a story about human resilience, ingenuity, and perseverance, however also one of paternalism, hubris, and misperception. He recounts centuries of setbacks, discoveries, deaths, and victories, all of which is told through the eyes of his peers and predecessors. Each of which having trained their wits against this infinitely resourceful adversary that, only three decades ago, was believed to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer”.

This book reads much like a literary thriller with cancer being the protagonist. From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to the nineteenth century recipients of primitive chemotherapy and radiation to Siddhartha’s own leukemia patient, named Carla; this book’s about all of the people that have soldiered through fiercely demanding regimens in order to survive. As well as increasing our own comprehension of such an iconic disease.

Surprising, riveting, and urgent, this book provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of all cancer treatments. This illuminating book provides clarity and hope to those that seek to demystify cancer.

Ken Burns adapted the book into a documentary film called “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies” in the year 2015, which was nominated for an Emmy Award.

“The Gene: An Intimate History” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2016. “The Gene”, spanning several centuries and the globe, tells the story about the quest to decipher the master code which defines and makes humans, which governs our function and form.

The story of the gene starts in this obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in the year 1856 where this monk stumbles across the idea about a ‘unit of heredity’. This intersects with Darwin’s own theory about evolution, and it collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics during the 1940s. The gene transforms post-war biology. It also reorganizes our comprehension of temperament, choice, sexuality, and free will. It is a story that is driven by human ingenuity and obsessive minds, from Francis Crick, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Rosalind Franklin, and James Watson, as well as the thousands of scientists continuing to work to understand the code of codes.

It’s a moving and epic history of one scientific idea coming to life. However woven through this book, like this red line, is this intimate history, the tale of Siddhartha’s own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, which reminds us that genetics is crucially relevant to everyday lives. Such concerns reverberate even more urgently today as we learn to “read” and “write” the human genome, and unleash the potential to alter the identities and fates of our kids.

Unflinching in its honesty and majestic in its ambition, “The Gene” provides a definitive account of the fundamental unit of heredity, and gives a vision of both humanity’s future and past.

In 2020, Ken Burns adapted the book into a two part documentary film for PBS Television.