Acclaimed author Siddhartha Mukherjee discusses the future of cancer

The grim facts: In this country alone, 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, triple by 2030.

Will science ever find a cure for humanity’s most ravaging scourge? And 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 equally troubling and confounding issues as the featured speaker at UC San Diego on Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2014, starting at 7 pm.

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 UC San Diego Helen Edison Lecture Series, the lecture will be third installment of the series “Overthrowing the Emperor of All Maladies: Moving Forward Against Cancer,” themed on Mukherjee’s widely acclaimed book.

Published in 2010, “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.

With a scientist’s precision and a novelist’s finesse, the narrative traces cancer’s plague on humanity from earliest recorded history up through contemporary times, imbued with Mukherjee’s own intensely personal discoveries and insights into the disease.

The New York Times described his book, his first, as “a history of eureka moments and decades of despair…an epic story that he seems compelled to tell, the way a passionate young priest might attempt a biography of Satan.”

Born and raised in India, Mukherjee is a graduate of Stanford University, Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard Medical School. He is currently an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University as well as a cancer physician at the CU/NYU Presbyterian Hospital.