WVU to host Pulitzer prize-winning author as part of the Festival of Ideas and DeLynn Lecture Series
There’s a person who nobody wants to meet, everyone wants to understand and until now has kept its long history in the shadows.
That person is cancer.
The illness has lived for more than 5,000 years, all the while intersecting many lives. Now, in a book that won the Pulitzer Prize this year, Siddhartha Mukherjee— an oncologist, Rhodes Scholar and author— is telling cancer’s biography as if it were one life that continues to live on.
Mukherjee will discuss his book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” at West Virginia University as part of the David C. Hardesty Jr. Festival of Ideas.
He will speak on Sept. 26 at 7:30 p.m. in the Lyell B. Clay Concert Theatre of the Creative Arts Center. A reception and book signing will follow. His speech is presented in partnership with the DeLynn Lecture Series and the Mary Babb Randolph Cancer Center.
One among the cast of characters in cancer's history is Matthew Mansfield Neely, a WVU alumnus, U.S. congressman, senator and West Virginia governor born in Doddridge County. A teacher, former lawyer and Fairmont mayor, Neely advocated for cancer research and education in his first term in the Senate, where he asked Congress to offer a $5 million reward for "information leading to the arrest of human cancer."
Neely was not a scientist, but he knew that in the previous 16 years cancer mortality had risen from 70,000 to 115,000.
In the late 1920s, Congress did authorize $50,000 for Neely's Cancer Control Bill and in 1937, in part due to his efforts, Congress established the National Cancer Institute, a center to coordinate cancer research and education, which is now part of the National Institutes of Health.
In his time as governor, Neely also advocated for combating the illness and pushed through a law that upped the funding for cancer treatment in the State Health Department.
Neely graduated from WVU in 1901 and from WVU's law school in 1902.
-Information compiled from the West Virginia Archives & History and "The Emperor of All Maladies."
Mukherjee’s tale began to form as he met a patient with stomach cancer.
She wanted to know what came next. And he didn’t have one book to give her.
“The Emperor of All Maladies” is the book that resulted from his experiences with cancer patients as well as his research into the early historical accounts of cancer such as that of the Persian Queen Atossa—whose Greek slave performed her surgery—and the major scientific breakthroughs that have brought humanity to a deeper understanding of a complex disease.
His story begins with a 36-year-old teacher with acute leukemia at Massachusetts General Hospital. He was in a two-year fellowship in oncology. She was in pain and frightened.
From there, he describes cancer, what we now know it to be and everything we thought it was, from the early researchers to the activists who have waged a long war against it and brought it into common parlance.
A physician, researcher and award-winning-science writer, Mukherjee was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for 2011. He is currently an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Center. He graduated from Stanford University, the University of Oxford and Harvard Medical School, and his work has been published in “Nature,” “The New England Journal of Medicine,” The New York Times and “The New Republic.”
Jean and Laurence DeLynn established the DeLynn Lecture Series in 1992 with an endowed gift to the Mary Babb Randolph Cancer Center. The series provides educational and informational presentations in the area of cancer research, treatment, education and prevention.
The series is supported in part by the David C. Hardesty Jr. Festival of Ideas Endowment. Other festival speakers will be announced in the coming months.
-WVU-
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CONTACT: Gretchen Hoover, University Events
304-293-8029, Gretchen.Hoover@mail.wvu.edu
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