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.
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.Kalanithi was married to Lucy (née Goddard), with whom he had a daughter, Elizabeth Acadia ("Cady").Lucy is an internist at Stanford University School of Medicine's Clinical Excellence Research Center 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.In May 2013, Kalanithi was diagnosed with metastatic stage IV non-small-cell EGFR-positive lung cancer.He died, aged 37, in March 2015.