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
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…
The population of India is now over a billion with an estimated 1.5 million cases of cancer diagnosed per year. The population of the United States is 295 million, and yet 1.5 million cancers will be diagnosed this year. The accompanying Table shows that the incidence of breast cancer in the US is 660/million while…
I will also ask for an appropriation of an extra $100 million to launch an intensive campaign to find a cure for cancer, and I will ask later for whatever additional funds can effectively be used. The time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took…