Dr. Azra Raza is the Chan Soon-Shiong Professor of Medicine and Director of the MDS Center at Columbia University in New York. She is an accomplished scientist who supervises a state-of-the-art basic research lab and a Tissue Repository of blood and marrow samples collected since 1984. Dr. Raza is a dedicated reader of Urdu literature, the co-author of GHALIB: Epistemologies of Elegance. She is the author of The First Cell: And the human costs of pursuing cancer’s last published by Basic Books