Washington: Indian American cancer specialist Siddhartha Mukherjee has bagged this year's Pulitzer prize in the general non-fiction category for his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
Delhi-born Mukherjee's book has been described 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".
The finalists in the category were The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain, by Nicholas Carr, and Empire of the Summer Moon, Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, by S.C. Gwynne.
Smoking main culprit
Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Centre.
He advocated a strong anti-smoking campaign and breast cancer screening to battle the growing incidence of the disease in India.
Less than a month after its publication, Mukherjee's book featured among The 10 Best Books of 2010 in the New York Times Book Reviews on Sunday, a rare feat for a work of non-fiction.
The doctor blamed an increase in cancer on tobacco smoking as "clearly one culprit among young men and women."
"But there are other culprits too," he added. "As the population ages and other diseases are slowly eliminated, cancer begins to come about. Cancer rises in the double negative only when all the other killers have been killed. So I think that's beginning to occur in some parts of South Asia."
Mukherjee, 40, grew up in New Delhi's Safdarjung Enclave, immersed in reading and books and studied at St Columba's School.
[/img][/COLOR]
