Another malady, another Pulitzer: Indian Doc's book on cancer wins prize

WASHINGTON: She is an interpreter of maladies. He's the biographer of one of the great maladies of all time. Dr Siddharth Mukherjee, a New Delhi-born oncologist, has been awarded a Pulitzer Prizefor his book "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer," more than a decade afterJhumpa Lahiri won the prize for her similarly-titled collection of short stories. 

While the New York-based Lahiri won the 2000 Pulitzer for fiction, Dr Mukherjee, 41, who also lives in Big Apple, has been awarded the 2011 prize for general non-fiction. In its citation, the Pulitzer committee described the book, which has won rave reviews, 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." 

Mukherjee joins a growing band of Indian-origin physicians who seem endowed with literary DNA. Among them, Dr Abraham Verghese, who began his writing career in the late 1980s with "My Own Country: A Doctor's story," which centered on the AIDS in the US, Dr Atul Gawande, a staff writer for the New Yorker and most recently author of 'The Checklist Manifesto," and Dr Deepak Chopra, the new age spiritual guru of mind-body dynamics, whose books are numerous. 

Mukherjee, who is currently serving as Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University and is also a staff cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Center, began his writing career more recently after an encounter with a patient who had stomach cancer, who told him she was willing to go on fighting, but she needed to know what she was battling. He couldn't point her to a book that could explain cancer, and he began writing as an answer to her query. 

Mukherjee tells the stories of several cancer patients and survivors, while recognizing pioneering researchers, including the breakthrough provided by the Indian scientist, Yellapragada Subba Rao (1895-1948) who synthesized the Folic Acid for the first antifolate clinical trials conducted by Sidney Farber, who initiated the treatment of childhood leukemia. 

Largely unrecognized and forgotten both in India and in the US (where he spent much of his career), Subba Rao is also credited with developing Methotrexate, one of the first cancer chemotherapy agents and still in widespread clinical use. In his book, Mukherjee muses about why Subba Rao, who came from the provincial town of Bhimavaram in Andhra Pradesh, never got his due (his peers won the Nobel), describing him as "a reclusive, nocturnal, heavily accented vegetarian who lived in a one-room apartment downtown, befriended only by other nocturnal recluses." 

Mukherjee came from a slightly different India to a more welcoming US. After schooling in New Delhi (St. Columba's, five years junior to Shah Rukh Khan), he went on to major in biology atStanford University, before winning a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University where he earned a Ph.D. in immunology. After graduation, he attended Harvard Medical School to train as an internist and won an oncology fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is married to the artist Sarah Sze, who is herself an accomplished sculptor and a recipient of the 2003 MacArthur Fellows "genius grant." 

Incidentally, Lahiri and Mukherjee are not the first Pulitzer winners of Indian-origin. That honor belongs to Gobind Bihari Lal, a US-based science writer (and contemporary of Subba Rao), who shared the 1937 Pulitzer with three other Americans "for their coverage of science at the tercentenary of Harvard University," -- the same university which denied Subba Rao a regular faculty position forcing him to go work at Lederle Laboratories. 

Although the Pulitzer award carries a modest prize of $10,000, the book will get another publicity bump, adding to the already significant critical acclaim. Published by Simon and Schuster in 2010, it was nominated as a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and made the Top Ten list under various categories in The New York Times, Time magazine and The Oprah magazine. 

Among the finalists Mukherjee pipped in non-fiction category were Nicholas Carr for "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain," and SC Gwynne for "Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History."

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/Another-malady-another-Pulitzer-Indian-Docs-book-on-cancer-wins-prize/articleshow/8029070.cms

NRIs fare no better on sex ratio front

NEW DELHI: It isn't just at home that India in particular, and Asia generally, have a problem of a low sex ratio. The sex ratio at birth among Indians and other Asian communities in the US is much lower than among the white and the black communities. This is a trend that was also found among Indians in the UK. 

The US trend was revealed in a paper published recently in the journal Prenatal Diagnosis, which compared the sex ratios of blacks, Chinese, Filipinos, Asian Indians and Koreans, relative to the whites. This was done by reviewing all US live births from 1975 to 2002 using National Centre for Health Statistics birth certificates in 4-year intervals. However, separate figures for Indians and Koreans were available only from 1991. 

In 1999-2002, the sex ratio at birth among Indians was 938 girls to 1,000 boys compared to 952 for the whites and 969 for the blacks, which was the highest. 

In 2007, a study at Oxford University by Sylvie Dubuc had shown that for children born to India-born mothers, between 1990 and 2005, the sex ratio was between 926 and 962 girls for every 1,000 boys. In cases where there was a third child, the ratio was even more skewed, 884 girls for 1,000 boys. 

Dubuc, who studied birth rates of different ethnic groups in England and Wales, found that in the 1970s, 971 girls were born for every 1,000 boys among those of Indian origin. But between 2000 and 2005, there were just 877 girls for every 1,000 boys. Dubuc wrote that the most plausible explanation for this trend was sex-selective abortion. 

The US study clearly shows that Indians are not alone in this practice as several other Asian communities too have skewed sex ratio at birth suggesting prenatal gender selection by these populations. However, the Indian community recorded the least fall in sex ratio among the Asians and thus seemed the most virtuous in comparison. 

In the absence of extrinsic factors, the sex ratio at birth is widely considered to be consistent across human populations ranging from 935 to 971 girls per 1,000 boys. The sex ratio for all US births from 1975 to 2002 was 952. However, in China, India, Korea and some other countries it was found to be less than 926 and this has been interpreted as having arisen through prenatal gender selection. 

Between 1999 and 2002, the sex ratio at birth of the Indian community in the US was 938, but other Asian groups like the Chinese with 928, Filipinos with 931 and Koreans with 934 fared even worse. 

On the other hand, Indians have recorded the steepest decline in sex ratio for the first birth. It was 976 in 1991-94, which was higher than even the black and the white communities. It fell to 943 by 1999-2002. In contrast, sex ratio at birth for second and third children in the Indian community has actually improved over this period. 

This could mean that sex selection is now happening right from the first birth and the pressure to select for subsequent children has hence come down compared to the past.

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/nri/news/NRIs-fare-no-better-on-sex-ratio-front/articleshow/7893770.cms