Presenter: Azra Raza MD
Chan Soon-Shiong Professor of Medicine
Clinical Director - Edward P. Evans Foundation, Myelodysplastic Syndromes (MDS) Center, Columbia University
Dr. Azra Raza is a Professor of Medicine and Director of the Myelodysplastic Syndromes (MDS) Center at Columbia University. Born in Karachi, Pakistan, she pursued her medical education at Dow Medical College, driven by an early passion for biology. With a research focus on MDS dating back to 1982, she has held prestigious roles at Rush University and the University of Massachusetts, where she led major hematology-oncology programs and established a vast tissue repository. Dr. Azra has published extensively in top-tier journals and authored the critically acclaimed book The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last. She also co-authored Ghalib: Epistemologies of Elegance, showcasing her literary engagement with Urdu poetry.
Reading Material
The First Cell:
And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last
Dr. Azra Raza
And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last
Dr. Azra Raza
In The First Cell, Dr. Azra offers a searing account of how both medicine and our society (mis)treats cancer, how we can do better, and why we must. A lyrical journey from hope to despair and back again, The First Cell explores cancer from every angle: medical, scientific, cultural, and personal. She describes how she bore the terrible burden of being her own husband's oncologist as he succumbed to leukemia. It is no ordinary book of medicine, but a book of wisdom and grace by an author who has devoted her life to making the unbearable easier to bear, born out of her engagement with two distinct cultures - the medical and the emotional. The book The First Cell is available for online purchase in Pakistan for a very modest cost (Rs 1,116).
Azra Raza. (2020). The first cell : and the human costs of pursuing cancer to the last. New York: Basic Books.