Books, Siddhartha Mukherjee says, just tumble out of him, like fluffy towels and clean socks cascade out of a dryer at the end of the cycle. And it’s a good thing, because it’s not as if the man has a lot of idle time to spare.
Mukherjee, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, an oncologist and a researcher of cancer treatments, is one of those people who appears to have found a glitch to exploit in the space-time continuum. He sees patients, runs a blood cancers research lab, co-parents two children, writes deeply researched features for The New Yorker, helps run four separate biotechnology and health care companies he co-founded, acts as adviser to a half-dozen more, and throws elaborate dinner parties with his wife, the sculptor Sarah Sze, that are a Manhattan byword.
Oh, and even as he was completing medical school at Harvard University, he trained as an Indian classical music vocalist. Although he reluctantly relinquished dreams of a parallel career as a singer, he continues to perform with a jazz fusion band.
And yet he insists that it is not difficult to make space to write books, exhaustive though they might be: His latest, “The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human,” thuds in at 480 pages. It will be published Oct. 25.
Read more at NYT : Siddhartha Mukherjee Weaves History and Biology to Tell the Story of Us.