Pulitzer Prize–Winning Physician to Deliver Menninger Lecture

Oncologist and author Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D., D.Phil., will deliver this year’s William C. Menninger Memorial Lecture at this evening’s Convocation of Distinguished Fellows. Mukherjee will touch on his extensive body of research, his experience as a physician leader, and the intersection of medical science and mental health.

Mukherjee is an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and an oncologist at the university’s medical center. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for his book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.” His book “The Gene: An Intimate History” was named one of the most influential books of 2016 by both The Washington Post and The New York Times. Both books have been adapted into PBS documentaries by filmmaker Ken Burns.

Mukherjee’s cancer research has enabled the development of treatments that move toward new biological and cellular therapies. He was among the first researchers to make cellular therapies available in India and to begin developing AI-based algorithms to discover human medicines.

In his writing, Mukherjee has discussed the biology of mental illnesses and how they have impacted him personally. In a 2022 article in The Guardian, he mused about his own experience with depression and delved into research focused on trying to better understand the illness. “Depression is a flaw in love,” he wrote. “But more fundamentally, perhaps, it is also a flaw in how neurons respond—slowly—to neurotransmitters…. It is a flaw in our cells that becomes a flaw in love.”

In “The Gene,” Mukherjee weaves together the history of genetic research with his family’s history of serious mental illness. He describes how his uncles and cousin grappled with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. “[T]hat story hung over my childhood and raised questions that were very urgent,” he said in a 2016 interview in The Guardian. “We’re often tempted to think about genes in terms of laboratories or universities, but of course it’s personal: It’s your story, it’s my story, it’s a story of how hereditary factors influence our lives.”

In a 2016 article in The New Yorker, Mukherjee described the ongoing effort to understand the genetic components of these life-altering mental illnesses. “One inevitable fantasy inspired by the identification of genes for mental illness is that we will someday discover treatments that can reverse their pathologies,” he wrote. “But which symptoms would we seek to abrogate or relieve? … [W]hat if the treatment, in its attempts to normalize the psyche, interrupted the construction of individual selves?” ■