PopTech : Blog : Siddhartha Mukherjee and Nina Dudnik fill significant scientific gaps

Siddhartha Mukherjee and Nina Dudnik fill significant scientific gaps

Emily Spivack ( Bio / Posts ) | Tuesday, November 16, 2010 UTC

On the heels of his PopTech talk on the history of cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book on the topic, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, has just been published. Already receiving rave reviews by The New Yorker and The New York Times, the concept behind the book was first developed when Mukherjee, a cancer physician and researcher, was treating a patient who pressed him for what seemed like pretty straightforward information about her disease.

He recalls, during his PopTech talk, the questions to which she was seeking answers: “What was it that she was fighting? How old was it? Since when has it begun to envelop our lives the way that it does today? Where are we going? What happens next and how did we get here in this moment of time with cancer being what it is?” Recognizing there was no resource he could direct his patients to for those answers, he took matters into his own hands to become “cancer’s biographer” and close the gaps about what we don’t know about cancer’s storied past.

Nina Dudnik, a 2010 Social Innovation Fellow, is also working to fill in scientific gaps, but in a very different way. With Seeding Labs, the organization she launched in 2003, Dudnik matches labs in the U.S. that are discarding a surplus of up-to-date gently used supplies with their counterparts in developing countries that could benefit greatly from the reclaimed equipment. Furthermore, to address the sense of isolation that many scientists with whom she was working feel, she established a network to connect them with one another. As a result of Seeding Labs’ facilitation, labs in 16 countries throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia have linked up with those in the United States to share skills, resources, and training as well as to cultivate the talent pool and strengthen the scientific community.