Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher. He is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician at the CU/NYU Presbyterian Hospital. Before taking the stage to talk about his book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction,he sat down for our In The Green Room Q&A.
Q. What do you wake up to in the mornings?
A. The sound of my children getting up.
Q. What surprises you the most about your life right now?
A. I think the fact that I can come home every evening and feel as if I have something else to look forward to. I have two full days – a work day and another day as a parent.
Q. What is the last habit you tried to kick?
A. Biting my nails.
Q. What do you consider to be the greatest simple pleasure?
A. Asparagus.
Q. What do you wish you had the nerve to do?
A. Paint more.
Q. Who is your favorite fictional character?
A. Pip from Great Expectations.
Q. What is your favorite cocktail?
A. A vodka martini.
Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A. A naturalist.
Q. If you could take only one more journey, where would you go?
A. Egypt.
Q. Whose talent do you wish you had?
A. George Orwell’s.
Q. What teacher or professor changed your life?
A. My high school English teacher. Incidentally she died of breast cancer.
Q. What is your most prized material possession?
A. I have two first edition books which are about 20 pages each which were published by Gandhi from the 1920s.
Q. Who is the one person living or dead you would most like to meet for dinner?
A. Albert Einstein.
To read more about Mukherjee’s talk, click here.
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.