Azra was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and is an oncologist and research scientist by profession. She lives in Manhattan with her daughter Sheherzad. In these scoundrel times, she is convinced that the best way “to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world” is by promoting and publicizing the achievements of humanity in science, art, and literature. She is specially moved by fine poetry. Email: azra.raza [at] columbia [dot] edu
Website: https://azraraza.com
by Azra Raza I recently read about a man who arrived in the United States from India with just thirty dollars in his pocket and, three decades later, had become a billionaire. When asked about the most important lesson of his journey, he answered without hesitation: money matters. Tara, the protagonist of A Splintering by…
by Azra Raza In June 1976, an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris was hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine along with two German radicals, diverted to Entebbe, Uganda, and received with open support from Idi Amin. There, the hijackers separated the passengers—releasing most non-Jewish travelers while…
by Azra Raza All of the articles in this series can be found here. On May 31st, 2021, I sent an email to John Pawelek, Senior Research Scientist at Yale University, requesting a zoom meeting. When a week went by without a response, I decided to call. Searching for his number, I came across his…
by Azra Raza All of the articles in this series can be found here. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) —Walt Whitman When King Midas asked Silenus what the best thing for man is, Silenus replied, “It is better not to have been born at…
by Azra Raza All of the articles in this series can be found here. Everyone agrees that early cancer detection saves lives. Yet, practically everyone is busy studying end-stage cancer. Reviewing the history of carcinogenesis from 1911 on, I become unspeakably, depressed. Demoralized. For fifty years, massive intellectual and financial resources have been invested pursuing…
by Azra Raza All of the articles in this series can be found here. Ninety percent cancers diagnosed at Stage I are cured. Ninety percent diagnosed at Stage IV are not. Early detection saves lives. Unfortunately, more than a third of the patients already have advanced disease at diagnosis. Most die. We can, and must,…
by Azra Raza All of the articles in this series can be found here. Cancer has occupied my intellectual and professional life for half a century now. Despite all the heartfelt investments in trying to find better solutions, I am still treating acute myeloid leukemia patients with the same two drugs I was using in…
Editor’s Note: My sister Azra has kindly given us permission to publish remarks that she delivered to The Citizen’s Foundation gala in Houston a few days ago. She will provide translations of the Urdu poetry soon. by Azra Raza Thank you Dr. Abdullah Jafari, thank you TCF, thank you Houston for giving me this opportunity…
by Azra Raza According to every convention, my friend Ifti was all wrong. He was born at the wrong time. He should have been born in 2150. He was born in the wrong country. He should have been born in Hollywood. He was born to the wrong parents. He should have been Tallulah Bankhead’s child.…
On the anniversary of his death: A tribute to Omar Azfar by Azra Raza, M.D. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’t is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness…
A tribute to Omar Azfar by Azra Raza, M.D. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’t is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Shakespeare, HAMLET, Act v.…
Azra Raza reviews Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners by Laura Claridge Laura Claridge’s enormously enjoyable, carefully researched, exhaustively annotated, insightful and engaging biography Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of Manners, made two points very clear to me; first, from birth to death, we humans need constant…
Surood e rafta baaz ayad kay nayadNasim e az hijaz ayad kay nayadSaramad rozgar e ein faqeerayDagar dana e raaz ayad kay nayad It was a lovely winter evening in 1983 when I first met Aini Apa at the home of my beloved Misdaq Khala Jaan (Saleha Abid Hussain, the prolific Urdu writer) in Okhla…
For Mother’s Day in May 2002, my husband Harvey ordered Stephen Wolfram’s book A New Kind Of Science for me. Harvey died a few days later and the book arrived after his memorial service. That summer I read the 1200-plus pages of this self-published tome, and I felt grateful to Mr. Wolfram as the book…
I recently read the novel Saturday by Ian McEwan. I have to admit that in the proverbial sense, despite all the excellent reviews this book has received since its release last year, it really is very good. Near the end, Mr. McEwan’s plot started me thinking about issues related to medical ethics, patient-doctor relationships and…
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,Moves on: nor all your Piety nor WitShall lure it back to cancel half a line,Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it. —Omar Khayyam Harvey died on May 19th 2002, at 3:20 p.m. The cause of death was chronic lymphocytic leukemia/lymphoma. Death approached Harvey twice: once…
Rock Brynner, 54, historian, writer, former road manager for The Band and for Bob Dylan and son of the late actor Yul Brynner, knows both sides of the story of the drug thalidomide. In 1998, after suffering for five years from a rare immune disorder, pyoderma gangrenosum, Rock Brynner took thalidomide and went into remission.…
In a peculiar sense, it is okay to refer to our individual selves as “we” without belonging to royalty, yet be scientifically precise since our bodies which have a thousand billion cells harbor ten thousand billion bacteria. Germs are Us. The male of our species may find it particularly hard to accept the idea that…
In 2001, I read Mark Buchanan’s wonderful book “Ubiquity” and became introduced to the concept of “critical states universality” through the “sand pile” game devised by physicists Per Bak, Chao Tang and Kurt Weisenfeld. They created a computer game in which grains of sand fall slowly and in a single file, and as the pile…
Cancer, the malignant evil that corrodes fatally, is supposed to start in one cell. In appearance and behavior, this cell and its daughters are so different from their “normal” predecessors and counterparts that they appear to represent a new species. In this essay, I suggest that the transformation of a non-malignant cell into a frankly…