Three-part series will begin on March 30.
By The American Bazaar Staff
NEW YORK: Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s 2010 Pulitzer Prize winning book ‘The Emperor of All Maladies’ is getting a new lease of life in the form of a television mini-series based on it and DVD/Blu-ray Disc release thereafter.
‘Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies’ is a three-part, six-hour television event from preeminent documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, in partnership with WETA, the flagship public broadcasting station in Washington, D.C.
The show airs on PBS this coming March 30th, 31st and April 1st. PBS Direct will release Blu-ray Disc and DVD sets with all three episodes of “Ken Burns Presents Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies” on April 28.
This “biography” of cancer – from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic “War on Cancer” in the last century – comes at a moment of inflection in the history of the disease, when scientific breakthroughs have put a cure within reach, according to a release by PBS.
The series matches the epic scale of the disease, reshaping the way the public sees cancer and stripping away some of the fear and misunderstanding that has long surrounded it. The story of cancer is a story of scientific hubris, paternalism, and misperception, but it is also a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance.
‘Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies’ examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective and a biographer’s passion. The series artfully weaves three different films in one: a riveting historical documentary; an engrossing and intimate vérité film; and a scientific and investigative report.
Mukherjee writes in the book: “This book is a ‘biography’ in the truest sense of the word. It is “an attempt to enter the mind of this immortal illness, to understand its personality, to demystify its behavior.”
The New York Times in its review of the book had this to say: “The Emperor of All Maladies” provides a survey of the different ways in which cancer has been understood in different eras, from the Greeks’ idea that it was caused by black bile, one of the four liquid humors, to the 19th-century conviction that the most drastic and disfiguring surgery would lead to the best cure. He also writes about the fund-raising, Nixon-era idea of waging war on cancer as if illness were an enemy to be faced in battle.”
The book went on to win many accolades, including the Pulitzer. It was named one of the 100 most influential books written in English since 1923 by TIME.
Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and staff physician at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. He has been the Plummer Visiting Professor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, the Joseph Garland lecturer at the Massachusetts Medical Society and an honorary visiting professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
He has been conferred the Padma Shri by India.