Siddhartha Mukherjee
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 1 October 2017
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer specialist. His biography of the disease, The Emperor of All Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. A haematologist and oncologist by training, his research focuses on cancer therapy and gene functions related to blood cells. His latest book, The Gene, goes in search of normality, identity, variation and heredity.
Born in India in 1970 he grew up with his extended family in Delhi. In his youth he trained as an Indian classical singer before travelling to the US to study biology at Stanford. At Oxford he was a Rhodes scholar before enrolling at Harvard to study medicine. He is currently Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Columbia University Medical Centre.
Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:02.0 | Hello, I'm Kristi Young. |
| 0:04.0 | Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item |
| 0:11.0 | that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island. |
| 0:15.0 | For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. |
| 0:22.0 | You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website. |
| 0:31.0 | Music |
| 0:48.0 | My cast away this week is the physician and writer Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, an oncologist, stem cell biologist and cancer geneticist. |
| 0:56.0 | He's also a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. |
| 0:59.0 | His work on the wards in the lab and on the page explores what he describes as the intersection of medicine, biology and culture. |
| 1:07.0 | In an era obsessed by genetics, his lab has, among other important things, identified the genes that regulate stem cells, his latest book, the gene and intimate history, |
| 1:18.0 | was inspired by a desire to understand the recurring pattern of mental illness within his own family. |
| 1:25.0 | Born in India at the start of the 1970s as a child, he was a gifted singer and took classical Indian music lessons each and every day. |
| 1:34.0 | Later, he studied at Stanford, Harvard and Oxford. These days, he lives, teaches and treats patients in New York. |
| 1:41.0 | He says his clinical work allows him to sit in at a moment of another person's life that is so hyper-acute. |
| 1:50.0 | It's also a moment of hope and expectation and concern. |
| 1:54.0 | Most days, I go home and feel rejuvenated. I feel abulliant and so welcome Siddhartha Mukherjee. |
| 2:01.0 | You're an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia Medical Center and you currently spend, I think, it's one day a week in clinic. |
| 2:09.0 | A Pulitzer Prize-winning author, as we know, and you are a brilliant storyteller. |
| 2:14.0 | Why is it useful to frame these stories that are in themselves fascinating in this much, much bigger picture of where we are now, where medicine is, where science is? |
| 2:23.0 | When I conceive of either the book on the gene or my previous book on cancer in Emperor, I started out by asking, what are we trying to answer here? |
| 2:33.0 | Why am I interested in it? This thing that envelops culture that invades, metastasizing into our lives in ways that are so complicated and that we struggle to understand. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.