Stories

Please join us at Portland’s Newmark Theatre on Friday, October 21, for the 2011 Saward Lecture. This year, we are proud to welcome Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, oncologist and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

Dr. Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, where he leads a multi-disciplinary research laboratory that is developing therapeutic interventions against leukemia, informed by innovative biological screening strategies. He is also a staff cancer physician at the Columbia/NYU Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. A Rhodes Scholar, he holds a PhD from Oxford University in immunology and an MD from Harvard Medical School.

His recent book, The Emperor of All Maladies, examines the origins and causes of cancer, its deadly effects on the human body, and its ubiquity in modern civilization. As Dr. Mukherjee notes, cancer touches in some way the lives of every man, woman, and child in the world, even as scientists and physicians work tirelessly to bring new treatments and hope to its victims. The Emperor of All Maladies won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and was named a New York Times Best Book of the Year and a Time magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book.

The Saward Lecture will take place on Friday, October 21, at 7:30 p.m. in the Newmark Theatre in downtown Portland. Tickets are free, but must be reserved in advance by e-mailing sawardlecture@kpchr.org or calling 503-335-2466. Provide your name, address, phone number, and the number of tickets you are requesting. Please keep in mind that requests often exceed the theater’s seating capacity. If your plans change, we appreciate your returning your tickets so that someone else can use them.

The Saward Lecture, now in its 21st year, is named after Ernie Saward, MD, the founder of the Center for Health Research and the first medical director of Kaiser Permanente Northwest.