As a practicing surgeon, an accomplished writer and speaker, Atul Gawande offers a unique and important "insider" voice on the realities of diagnosis and treatment of patients and the challenges of modern medicine. He is eloquent in reflecting the conflicts and concerns within the medical community and provides insight into the issues of ethics and performance that all professionals face.

Atul Gawande provides an unprecedented look into the heart and soul of medicine. Dr. Gawande is a general surgeon at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and is an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Gawande's book, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, features 14 dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors which he wrote for The New Yorker, where he is a staff writer on medicine and science. Atul also writes regularly for the New England Journal of Medicine.

In Complications, Dr. Gawande offers a raw view from the scalpel's edge, where science is ambiguous, information is limited, the stakes are high, yet decisions must be made. Both tough-minded and humane, Complications is unafraid to confront the conflicts and uncertainties, the power and the limits that lie at the heart of modern medicine, yet always alive to the possibilities of wisdom in humanity's heroic attempts at healing.

A serious surgeon and writer by day, Gawande reveals, "I have always believed that there is nothing greater than a life in rock 'n roll - it has to be good rock 'n roll - and I still think it is true." As for his writing, Gawande says, "I was never born to write. I was taught to write. And I am still being taught to write." Gawande lives with his wife and three children in Newton, Massachusetts.

NOTE: Bio is as it appeared in the Forum program from December 3, 2004.