Siddhartha Mukherjee

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Siddhartha Mukherjee0:01

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Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book, and the luxury item that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.

Presenter0:16

For rights' reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. You can find over two thousand more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Disc's website.

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My castaway this week is the physician and writer Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, an oncologist, stem cell biologist, and cancer geneticist. He's also a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. His work on the wards in the lab and on the page explores what he describes as the intersection of medicine, biology, and culture. In an era obsessed by genetics, his lab has, among other important things, identified the genes that regulate stem cells. His latest book, The Gene and Intimate History, was inspired by a desire to understand the recurring pattern of mental illness within his own family.

Presenter1:25

Born in India at the start of the 1970s, as a child he was a gifted singer and took classical Indian music lessons each and every day. Later he studied at Stanford, Harvard and Oxford. These days he lives, teaches and treats patients in New York. He says his clinical work allows him to sit in at a moment of another person's life that is so hyper-acute. It's also a moment of hope. and expectation and concern. Most days I go home and feel rejuvenated. I feel ebullient. And so welcome, Siddhartha Mkurji. You're an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia Medical Centre and you currently spend, I think it's one day a week in clinic. A Pulitzer Prize-winning author as we know and you are a brilliant storyteller. Why is it useful

Presenter2:15

To frame these stories that are in themselves fascinating in this much, much bigger picture of where we are now, where medicine is, where science is.

Siddhartha Mukherjee2:23

When I conceive of either the book on the gene or my previous book on cancer in Emperor, I started out by asking, what are we trying to answer here? Why am I interested in it? You know, this thing that envelops culture, that invades, metastasizing into our lives in ways that are so complicated and that we struggle to understand. But in the midst of all of this sort of whirr, there is a single human being in some clinic somewhere getting her head shaved because she is anticipating chemotherapy tomorrow, or deciding whether or not to take a drug that is experimental, or signing a consent form to sign up for a therapeutic trial. And her question, his question, is very simple. Where are we and how do we get here? Where are we going next? And then the stories become ways to answer that question.

Presenter3:11

You mentioned the Emperor, you called it, we should tell listeners, of course, it's the Emperor of all maladies, and it charts the history of the treatment of cancer.

Presenter3:18

Now, I've written it from its first mention in 2625 BC. Is that right?

Siddhartha Mukherjee3:24

That that's yes, a pressure.

Presenter3:25

Yes, I'm not going to hold you to it exactly. We're all familiar, of course, with the statistics. Between one in two or one in three of us will get a cancer diagnosis in our lifetime. Of course, the reason so many of us will is because, as you explained, it's because we're living much longer.

Siddhartha Mukherjee3:29

Exactly.

Presenter3:44

What would you like?

Presenter3:46

Us, so many of us who will be the patients to understand about cancer.

Siddhartha Mukherjee3:51

One important thing to keep at the front is that this disease I think is not going away. The idea that we will erase it from the face of human history, I think is a pipe dream. It is part of us, not only in a cultural way, but it's part of us in a biological way. There's a biological truth to the idea that the very genes that cause our wounds to heal and our embryos to grow, which give us the capacity to become multicellular organisms with all the beautiful things that come with it, are vulnerabilities and they're inescapable vulnerabilities. That's the important piece of it. We can't scratch them out of ourselves, of our souls, of our biological beings. And so the two helices, as it were, of cancer and humans are twisted around each other. And that's not to be nihilistic about the treatment of cancer, but it is to recognize that part of the complexity of treating cancer is that there are very few diseases where the fundamental of the disease is so locked in with the fundamental of who we are.

Presenter5:01

Let's go to the music, said Arthur McCurty. Tell me about your first piece of music, and why have you chosen it?

Siddhartha Mukherjee5:05

We start with Billie Holiday because she's Billie Holiday. It's as if she doesn't sing with her voice, she sings with some some other part of her being. But I like the lyrics of this song, All of Me. It seems so much a metaphor for the body, for what doctors do, what patients go through.

Speaker 45:26

All of me Why not take all of me?

Speaker 45:35

Can't you see I'm not good without you?

Speaker 45:44

Take my lip.

Speaker 45:47

I want to lose them.

Speaker 45:53

Take my homes, I'll never use them.

Presenter6:02

That was Billie Holiday and all of me. Siddhartha Mukherjee, I'm going to ask you the almost inevitable question, which is about the future of medicine. If you can picture us in 10 years' time having a conversation, what can we expect that you think will be the significant and major development in medicine? I think.

Siddhartha Mukherjee6:22

Particularly in cancer. Here's what we've learned about cancer, that detecting cancer early is possible. And if we can avoid overdiagnosis and over-treatment, then detecting cancer early and treating it with the appropriate kind of therapy is effective. Number two is that treating cancers vulnerabilities that are unique in particular that one cancer is possible and desirable. And number three is that treating the environment around cancer, the immune system, et cetera, is possible and desirable. So in the next 10 years, we're going to try to deploy this. It's like living on the edge of an experiment. We're going to ask the question, if we do this systematically in cancers, can we learn to treat cancers in a more rational, reasonable way? I think in the next 10 years we'll see that happening with cancer. And to me, that's extraordinarily exciting.

Presenter7:13

Our mental attitude to disease is reflected so much in the language we use around it. And of course the language we use around cancer is battling it and beat it in the sense in which we are participative in the activity of getting rid of this disease. What do you make of that? And I mean does it annoy you?

Speaker 47:25

Yeah.

Siddhartha Mukherjee7:25

Yeah.

Siddhartha Mukherjee7:34

It doesn't annoy me, you know. Patients, doctors, we, you, me, will have different conceptions of their illness. Some of them actually like battling. There was a time fifty odd years ago when there was a fatalism around cancer. No one was battling it because it was not talked about. And then there was a time 30 years later where everyone was battling it and fighting it because it was thought to be curable. So each of these moments, I think, comes with its own burdens. I think, thankfully, this is part of the abolition of this moment. Thankfully, we're slowly understanding that the biology dictates what happens to you. It isn't you, it's the cancer. And to a large extent, that's true.

Presenter8:16

Tell me about your next piece. We're going to hear what now.

Siddhartha Mukherjee8:19

So this takes me back all the way to my childhood and I had musical training, which I later abandoned, but I had musical training for years and it was in Indian classical music. And if you're an Indian classical music aficionado, Ustada Mirkhan is considered one of the greatest of the greats. Malkonse is a rock that's performed usually at close to midnight. And I love this recording because it comes at you. I love the gritty rawness of the voice. It's like thunder in the middle of the night when you wake up and it's raining and there's thunder. So it's an extraordinarily important recording for Indian classical music.

Siddhartha Mukherjee9:06

No, I'm

Speaker 39:26

Yeah.

Presenter9:33

Ustadamir Khan and Raghamalkans. Um Siddhartha Mukherjee, we know you did this uh classical Indian music training every day singing. Do do you still sing at all for pleasure?

Siddhartha Mukherjee9:44

I do. It was probably the most major part of my childhood. When I started, I was seven, once a week. But by the time I was twelve, it was every day, except for weekends, and it would be at two hours a day. And, you know, Indian classical music training really involves for the first three, four, five years just doing vocal scales. And it's mind-numblingly boring. And I hated it. And then about three years or four years once you finish these scales, then all of a sudden whoever's teaching you says, why don't you sing this phrase? And I think it's a little bit like the feeling that birds have when they leave their nest. All of a sudden, you know, you shake your wings in a particular way and you can fly. It's an astonishing feeling.

Presenter10:30

Why did you give it up?

Siddhartha Mukherjee10:32

Well, partly I wasn't good enough. Um

Presenter10:35

Did you have do you have very high standards for that? I mean, good enough for what?

Siddhartha Mukherjee10:37

It's the

Presenter10:38

Infra professional?

Siddhartha Mukherjee10:38

For profession, do you think?

Presenter10:42

Your family originally was from Bengal. They moved to New Delhi just as you were born, around about nineteen seventy.

Siddhartha Mukherjee10:48

That's right. So my my father was in Calcutta and he moved to Delhi actually before I was born and met my mother in Delhi. My mother was from a Bengali family.

Presenter10:56

Your paternal grandmother came to live with your family. Can you tell me a little bit more about her?

Siddhartha Mukherjee11:01

She was a difficult but inspiring character. She had by then already lost one son who had succumbed to illness, but basically triggered by his bipolar disorder. And another son, so another uncle, was becoming floridly schizophrenic at that time. And so she came to live with us with her son, and they lived in the same room. And she's a powerfully austere person. She had seven articles of clothing which she would wash every day and wear only those. She cooked her own meals and she cooked the same meal every day. I mean, I write to think. And until I wrote about it, I didn't fully figure out what it really meant. But the conflict was between her as a protector of her schizophrenic son and my father, who was her favorite child. And so she turned against my father, who was, as I said, her favorite son, in a way that was like a tigress. But the idea of protecting the ill child obviously left a very deep impression on me, I think, and ultimately had an impact on how I chose to live my life.

Presenter12:10

So much to talk about. But of course, we have to fit in this wonderful list, Siddhartha Mukherjee. So tell me about your third.

Siddhartha Mukherjee12:17

To contrast with Amir Khan's Thunder at Midnight, I also wanted to play something more lyrical from Indian classical music. Shahi Parvez was beginning to play music at approximately the same time I was growing up and he's playing Bihag here, an evening melody. Shahi Parvez is now considered, now in his forties and fifties, considered the preeminent maestro of Sitar.

Presenter13:18

That was Shaheed Parveez and Ragha Bihag. You have spoken then about the diagnosis of schizophrenia within the family, your uncle and then indeed I think another uncle. Two uncles and a cousin. And you have written about the fear of these mental health diagnoses in your family as being like toxic waste is the powerful phrase you used. It's brilliantly descriptive, but I want you to explain more.

Siddhartha Mukherjee13:43

A few months ago, I met this woman who had a diagnosis of breast cancer, and her mother and her grandmother had both died of breast cancer. And she had a mutation in the gene called BRCA1. Many people know about it. And she had two daughters, and she had gone ahead, and with partial consent, she had actually screened those two daughters, and only one of them had inherited the mutation. And these two daughters were pre-adolescent. They hadn't even developed breasts. And yet, she knew one of these daughters carried a genetic mark that, in some distant future, would increase her propensity for having the disease that had killed this woman's mother and grandmother, you know, maybe by five, tenfold. And fundamentally, the two daughters could no longer be the same for this woman. Basically, that knowledge would be toxic for her. That's the kind of idea I was trying to get at. Once you learn about genetic propensities in your family, particularly perhaps for mental illness, that knowledge becomes a kind of toxic waste. You're always anticipating it in your own children. You're wondering whether that tantrum is adolescence or some kind of moment of breakdown.

Presenter15:02

And what about in yourself?

Siddhartha Mukherjee15:04

I think in yourself, at least in for myself, that same knowledge is kind of granted me a kind of immunity. It meant, God, you know, if it happens, it happens, I know what it looks like. And as long as I know what it looks like, I'm okay. Because it was so close. You know, watching in this back room where my grandmother and my uncle lived, watching him sort of slowly unravel mentally. You watch it happen. You you see the the kind of unspooling of thoughts ideas.

Presenter15:35

As you were a teenage boy with your father, with your mother, was it talked about what was happening?

Siddhartha Mukherjee15:42

We talked about it a little bit. You know, we didn't even have the vocabulary. At first, the vocabulary was he's strange. Th then the vocabulary became he's ill, he's depressed. We didn't even know the word schizophrenia. We didn't have the vocabulary. Except for those words, strange, depressed. Frightening? Frightening, fri frightened. He was frightened himself. He was frequently frightened himself. And were you frightened? You know, I I was very fond of him. I wouldn't describe myself as frightened. I you know, there was kind of a dark comedy because he was very indulgent with me. He would take me on these trips and often get lost. I remember one particular time that he lost me in one of these big Indian street fairs, which can go on for m miles. And I remember someone be from home being dispatched to bring me back. So more music, Siddhartha Mukherjee. Tell me about.

Presenter16:28

But you're

Siddhartha Mukherjee16:29

Next, we're on your fourth. It was very late to the jazz party, which was unusual, because of course the connections between jazz and Indian classical music are so apparent now. Both improvised, both rhythmically complex, both melodically similar. But of but once I discovered it with all these parallels, I became addicted. And I discovered monk when I was in Oxford. And I think around midnight might have been the first recording that I heard.

Presenter18:03

The Lonius Monk and round midnight. Siddhartha Mukherjee, you say of the work you do right now on cancer, the the the bench work, if you like, in your laboratory, that ninety-nine percent of it will be unsuccessful.

Presenter18:17

Seems like a rather dispiriting rate to live with.

Siddhartha Mukherjee18:20

W well, the one percent is successful. I get that. Exactly. So, you know, I think being in medicine and certainly being in science, that's the bargain you take. The one percent that's successful, of course, is the phenomenal one percent. That one percent will change your life in change our lives in ways that are unimaginable.

Presenter18:23

Yeah.

Presenter18:39

I know, of course, that there is not a moment of discovery. Yes. There is, of course, a path to discovery and a journey on which you and your team are together.

Siddhartha Mukherjee18:45

Yeah.

Siddhartha Mukherjee18:47

Oh, to

Presenter18:49

But at the point at which you know you're onto something and you know that thing is game-changing, describe that.

Siddhartha Mukherjee18:51

Yeah.

Siddhartha Mukherjee18:56

Robert Sapolsky, who's a writer, described it once to me. He was actually a professor at Stanford. He described to me as if all of a sudden you get handed and you get to own a little slice of the universe. I like that idea very much, that you feel as if you've opened a trapdoor and discovered a piece of the natural world. It's an entirely addictive feeling. And like all kinds of addicts, we live for that high. I remember when I was working on Epstein-Barr virus at Oxford, I very clearly remember when I began to understand why this virus might escape the immune system. I remember the experiment that I did, I remember the night it was done, I remember coming in at night, reading the, you know, in those days we used to read, this was all done radioactively. These days we don't do radioactively, but you had to sit in front of the counter and it was excruciatingly slow because it would read one well by another well and there were 96 wells to be read. And you would sit by the counter and you had to watch it because of course it was glowing with radioactivity. And I remember sitting there and from the numbers I knew that the experiment had worked and then we repeated it several times. But I think I went home and went to sleep. There was no one to celebrate with.

Presenter20:09

Some more music, uh Siddhartha Mukherjee. Tell me about your next one then.

Siddhartha Mukherjee20:12

We are on your fifth. Yeah, so actually, five, six, and seven are related. And they're related because they are riffs on the idea of how music from India makes its way into so many different places and different forms. The next one is Vijay Iyer, a great jazz composer and pianist working out of New York and other places. And this piece is called Galang. What you'll hear is this piece in which you hear this syncopated rhythm. And this rhythm is exciting, and I like the liveness of it.

Presenter21:54

V J Eyre and Gallang. I wonder, Siddhartha Mukherjee, if you will indulge me, humour me a little bit and do some genetics for dummies in the next section. And what's the most exciting development in the field of genetics at the moment?

Siddhartha Mukherjee22:07

Well, that's relatively clear. We are learning to read the human genome, and by read I mean ascribe meaning to individual variation in the human genome. And we're learning to write. And by that I mean we're learning how to make deliberate changes in our own genetic code.

Presenter22:13

Yeah.

Presenter22:24

So we are about to be able to edit our own stories.

Siddhartha Mukherjee22:27

That's right. Just to be very clear about one important idea. Most people who study genes know that genes plus environment plus chance are involved in giving rise to human traits and human fate and so forth. It's not genes alone. But that's that genes have emerged as a powerful force in that equation. And being able to read, being able to understand how genetic variation in humans intersects with chance and environment and other genes to produce human variation is an important idea because, of course, that allows it to understand what the information is in the human genome. And then on the flip side, as you're saying, being able to edit that information, being able to change that information, gives us unprecedented power. The question that the gene asks, the book asks, is what happens to a machine that learns to read and write its own instructions? What would happen if a machine began to write its own instruction manual? For human beings, we are there now.

Presenter23:27

So that science of heredity and being able to interrupt these stories, change them, edit them, influence them indelibly.

Presenter23:36

When you spoke earlier about the patient of yours with the BRCA one gene and said that she knew that one of her daughters, who wasn't even yet pubescent, carried the gene and the other did not, you sounded like you didn't think this was a terribly good piece of information to be carrying.

Siddhartha Mukherjee23:40

said

Siddhartha Mukherjee23:51

No, I should should say that I I think it's important piece of information to be count it's what we just have to understand. I'm not sure we're ready to digest this moment, which is to say that the changes that our understanding of genes force us to encounter are enormous. And we we can't go blindly into this arena. You know, I'm a physician. I I would love to be able to prevent breast cancer by screening a woman who has a higher risk in a way that is appropriate for her to be screened without over diagnosing her, without over treating her. This would be a wonderful thing. I'm a physician. I would like to be able to give a woman or a man the possibility of knowing what diseases they may or may not have in the future so they can prepare themselves, whether medically speaking, however it might be.

Siddhartha Mukherjee24:46

I I j I think that they're in incredible

Siddhartha Mukherjee24:49

Incredibly important positive things that come out of it.

Presenter24:52

But you will

Siddhartha Mukherjee24:52

Also run

Presenter24:52

about the idea that in doing that what we also do is we eradicate our vulnerabilities, we take away potentially our sensitivities. You know, in life we are in death. This is part of who we are and how we are.

Siddhartha Mukherjee25:06

Absolutely, and the importance I think is to now tread a relatively narrow road between understanding and predicting what will happen to us in the future based on genetic information and allowing us the capacity to remain variable and vulnerable and different.

Presenter25:31

More music, Siddhartha. Tell me what we are going to hear next. This is your sixth disc of the day.

Siddhartha Mukherjee25:37

I'm glad we talked about vulnerability and language because Juan Muneo, the great flamenco vocalist, in fact there's a theory that flamenco music really originates in India. So you'll hear, at least to my ears, an immediate connection to Amir Khan. The same rawness of the voice, the same grittiness of the edge of the voice, the same pathos, of course. Juan Muneo is considered, people have called him the saddest voice in flamenco. I sometimes think of him as the saddest voice that exists.

Speaker 426:13

Jaha Jaha

Speaker 426:23

Ah yeah.

Siddhartha Mukherjee26:29

Ah!

Siddhartha Mukherjee26:29

I

Speaker 326:48

Doloren.

Presenter26:49

That was Juan Mone there. Um, Sartha Mukherjee, I've seen some very beguiling photographs of you and your wife, I think, in American vogue. You surely look like the golden couple. How did you meet?

Siddhartha Mukherjee27:03

My wife, Sarah is a sculptor. I knew Sarah's work before I knew Sarah. And we met through a common friend actually who worked in Sarah's studio but also was a student at Oxford. But I had admired Sarah's work for years and years and I found it, I think I can say this, I found it connected to my own work. All the sculptures had a physiology to them. And of course addressed the question of information and how does information travel within the sculpture itself. So of course I was fascinated and that's how we met.

Presenter27:08

Yeah.

Presenter27:38

Uh you have two children. Is it true that when your first child, your daughter, was born, one of the first things that occurred to you was harvesting the umbilical cord for treatment for children with leukemia?

Siddhartha Mukherjee27:49

Yes, it is true. It is true. And it wasn't a particularly pleasant experience either because the person who delivered our oldest child, I was a doctor in the same hospital, and even the anesthesiologist was a friend. It's interesting, I think when Leela was born, I went frankly mad for a while. I think it happens to other doctors as well, that intense moment when something is happening to you, or in this case really to Sarah, and you want to control every piece of it. So I went frankly mad. I should have actually gone and seen a psychiatrist at that point. I didn't. Umbilical cord blood has blood stem cells. And I use cord blood to transplant patients with leukemia. It's an incredibly precious resource. So I wanted to make sure that Leela's cord blood was banked, not for herself as much as in case anyone needed it. So the person who was doing this was the obstetrician. And I was hovering over her, telling her, no, no, no, don't put the bevel in left-wise. Put the bevel in right-wise, because that way you will get the best harvest. And she looked at me as if, I mean, why are you in this room? If you're not going to be the father, if you're going to be the father, then shut up and allow me to deliver the child. But if you're going to hover and tell me what to do constantly and interrupt things, then we just have to get someone, you know, hospital security to take you away. Did you shut up? I finally shut up, yes. It took some while.

Presenter27:49

Yeah.

Presenter29:11

Okay, well

Presenter29:13

Some more music, tell me what's next.

Siddhartha Mukherjee29:16

Next, by Philip Glass, because again, and Glass has written about it himself, inspired by this kind of cerebral, circular, meditative quality of Indian classical music that he learned from many, many people. And this ruminative quality, this mathematical quality, which really looks like somehow looks like a sequence to me, and the name metamorphosis. We're in the process, I think, as we learn to read and write human genomes with all the caveats I told you before, we are going to metamorphosize as a species.

Presenter30:57

That was Philip Glass, Metamorphosis V. Siddhartha Mukherjee, what can we best do ourselves, given that so much of your life is involved in probing our genetic inheritance and how that influences our health outcomes?

Presenter31:11

Is it worth taking care of ourselves? Is it worth eating our broccoli and having one glass less of wine?

Siddhartha Mukherjee31:17

Honestly? No, I think what's interesting actually, if you look at some of the studies in genetics these days, the influence of behavior for certain kinds of genetic risks can be enormous. There's a nice study that shows that if you have an elevated genetic risk of cardiovascular disease, you can nearly bring down the risk to a baseline by modifying your diet. Now, of course, cardiovascular disease is a powerful disease that's modified by the environment, in this case the diet. Other diseases less so. We have to go through it case by case. I don't think there's going to be a magic formula here.

Presenter31:18

Honestly.

Presenter31:54

How has your work affected your attitude to your own mortality?

Siddhartha Mukherjee32:00

I think it's it's uh simplified things for me. I was very intrigued and moved by two other books in recent times, Being Mortal by Atul Gawande, who I know has been on your on your show, and Paul Kalanithi's book, When Breath Becomes Air. They're telling us something about the human body and how ultimately we're programmed to die. And what that means, where where do we stop treating, where do we start thinking about the end, is a question that I think will occupy us for the next fifty odd years as we make new advances in cancer therapy in particular.

Speaker 432:12

Yeah.

Presenter32:12

Yeah.

Presenter32:35

What's your relationship with solitude? You know I'm about to cast you away, all alone, to this island.

Siddhartha Mukherjee32:38

Alone to

Siddhartha Mukherjee32:40

How will that be? I love solitude. You know, one thing that music, or at least training musically makes you love, is silence. And you know, when I thought about putting this together, actually the thing that came to mind was not so much a desert island, but was a journey in space. These are the eight things that I would take with me to space. And if I was woken up suddenly in the middle of it, I would like these eight things to listen to for the next 200 years while my spaceship was taking me to Mars or something like that.

Presenter33:10

Let's hear, then, your final piece, your final choice to day.

Siddhartha Mukherjee33:13

The final choice is it actually goes back to solitude because at Oxford I would run around Portmeadow by myself, usually at night after I'd finished working in the lab, and I needed something to run to. And I would almost always listen to the same piece over and over again. It was none other than the great Aretha herself. It's nice that this is book ended by Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin, but I needed something a little bit more upbeat and optimistic and peppy, but also strong. So here we have respect.

Speaker 433:51

What do you need for me?

Speaker 433:53

You know I got it.

Speaker 433:55

All I'm asking is for a little respect when you just a little bit, baby, baby, just a little bit more.

Speaker 434:03

Just a little bit, mister, just a little bit.

Speaker 434:08

I ain't gonna do you wrong!

Speaker 434:21

Yeah.

Speaker 434:22

Uh

Presenter34:24

Aretha Franklin and uh respect. I give everybody the books who is a cast away on Desert Island Discs, uh Siddhartha. So you will get the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. You get to take another book of your choosing. What's yours going to be?

Siddhartha Mukherjee34:36

Uh

Presenter34:36

Yeah.

Siddhartha Mukherjee34:37

Well, I would take the complete works of George Orwell. I find him refreshing to read. Sometimes he's a slap in your face, but there's a kind of clarity, a lucidity that comes with seeing the world for what it is and pointing out all its perversities, but also some of its beautiful things.

Presenter34:58

You may have that then. We allow our castaways a luxury. It can't be anything practical, really. What would you like to take?

Siddhartha Mukherjee35:04

What would you like to take? Oh, I have so many non-practical luxuries. But I'll take two, but you can we can I can choose one of them. So one you already talked about is silence. And there's plenty. Yes, you can have that for free. But the other one is a microscope. Every morning really begins at the ritual for me. When I go to the lab, or even when I'm going to see patients, I look at biopsies. And if I was sitting in a desert island somewhere, I had nothing else to do, at least that'd be the whole sub-visual world. I could look at all the beetles and the things that were on the island and discover a whole new world with them. So that would be my luxury, a small, portable light microscope.

Presenter35:10

Yeah.

Presenter35:15

Yes, you can have that for free.

Presenter35:41

Would you worry about getting grains of sand in the middle of the middle? If you had to save one of these eight disks from the waves, which one would it be?

Siddhartha Mukherjee35:43

No, I will be very, very careful with this.

Siddhartha Mukherjee35:51

It might have to be Billy Holiday.

Presenter35:54

It's yours. Siddhartha Mukherjee, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert islandists.

Siddhartha Mukherjee35:57

You're disciplined disks. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Presenter36:19

I hope you enjoyed this edition of Desert Island Discs. You will find more interviews with comedians, artists, musicians, scientists, sports stars and more at bbc.co.uk slash desertisland discs.

Speaker 436:54

This is the BBC.