Siddhartha Mukherjee: Examining the future of cancer

Will science ever find a cure for humanity’s most ravaging scourge? What’s taken so long for significant breakthroughs to be made?

Siddhartha Mukherjee, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,” will delve into these epochal issues as the featured speaker at UC San Diego on Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2014, starting at 7 pm.

 
Siddhartha Mukherjee

Open to the public at no charge, the event will be held at UC San Diego Price Center West Ballroom. Serving as moderator will be Dean Nelson, founder and director of the journalism department of Point Loma Nazarene University.

Co-presented by UC San Diego Extension and the Center for Ethics in Science & Technology as part of the Helen Edison Lecture Series, the event will be the fourth and final installment of “Overthrowing the Emperor of All Maladies: Moving Forward Against Cancer,” themed on Mukherjee’s acclaimed 2010 book.

Described as a biography of cancer, “The Emperor of All Maladies” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and was cited by Time magazine as one of the most influential English-language books of the modern era.

Meanwhile, these grim facts remain: In the U.S., one in two males and one in three females will get cancer during their lifetime, resulting in death for one in four. Globally, cases of cancer doubled between 1975 and 2000. The rate is expected to double again by 2020 and triple by 2030.