Paul Kalanithi

Paul Sudhir Arul Kalanithi (April 1, 1977 – March 9, 2015) was an Indian-American neurosurgeon and writer. His book When Breath Becomes Air is a memoir about his life and illness battling stage IV metastatic lung cancer. It was posthumously published by Random House in January 2016. It was on The New York Times Non-Fiction Best Seller list for multiple weeks.

Paul Kalanithi was born on April 1, 1977 and lived in Westchester, New York. He was born to a Christian family hailing from Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, India. Kalanithi had two brothers, Jeevan and Suman; Jeevan is a computer/robotics engineer and Suman is a neurologist. The family moved from Bronxville, New York to Kingman, Arizona when Kalanithi was 10. Kalanithi attended Kingman High School, where he graduated as valedictorian.

Kalanithi attended Stanford University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in English Literature and a Bachelor of Science in Human Biology in 2000. After Stanford, he attended the University of Cambridge, where he studied at Darwin College and graduated with a Master of Arts in the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine. Although he initially considered pursuing a Ph.D. in English Literature, Kalanithi then attended the Yale School of Medicine, where he graduated in 2007 cum laude, winning the Dr. Louis H. Nahum Prize for his research on Tourette’s syndrome. He was inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha national medical honor society.

At Yale, Kalanithi met Lucy Goddard, who would become his future wife.

After graduating from medical school, Kalanithi returned to Stanford to complete his residency training in neurosurgery and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience at Stanford University School of Medicine.

In May 2013, Kalanithi was diagnosed with metastatic stage IV non-small-cell EGFR-positive lung cancer. He died, aged 37, in March 2015.

Kalanithi was married to Lucy (née Goddard), with whom he had a daughter in 2014, Elizabeth Acadia ("Cady"). Lucy is an internist at Stanford University and wrote the epilogue to When Breath Becomes Air.

Although Kalanithi was raised in a devout Christian family, he turned away from the faith in his teens and twenties in favour of other ideas. However, he retained "the central values of Christianity — sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness" and returned to Christianity later in his life. In his book, he even states that if he had been more religious in his youth, he would have become a pastor.