Deepak Chopra: From Hospital Chief of Staff to the Ig Nobel Prize

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Deepak Chopra was born in New Delhi in 1946, the son of a prominent cardiologist who served as a British army doctor in Burma and advised Lord Mountbatten. He graduated from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in 1969, worked in rural villages, and was drawn to neuroendocrinology. Because India barred its doctors from the US medical exam, he traveled to Sri Lanka to sit it, emigrated in 1970, landed in New Jersey, and by 1973 held a Massachusetts license. He became board certified in internal medicine and endocrinology, taught at Tufts, Boston University and Harvard, and became chief of staff at New England Memorial Hospital while drinking black coffee by the hour, smoking a pack a day, and coming to see himself as a legalized drug pusher.

In 1981 he met an Ayurvedic physician in New Delhi and took up Transcendental Meditation to quit smoking. In 1985 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi asked him to set up an Ayurvedic health center, and he resigned from the hospital to run one that drew clients such as Elizabeth Taylor. His 1989 book Quantum Healing followed, and a July 1993 Oprah Winfrey appearance sold 400,000 copies of Ageless Body, Timeless Mind in a week, after which the TM movement cut ties within four days. In California he built an empire estimated to gross $20 million a year, argued that consciousness creates matter and that aging can be reversed, and drew fierce criticism from Richard Dawkins, Paul Offit, David Gorski and physicists who rejected his use of quantum terms.

• He later defended his use of quantum as a metaphor for healing rather than literal physics.
• He received the satirical Ig Nobel Prize in physics in 1998.
• He was criticized for suggesting HIV emits a sound that tricks DNA and that Ayurvedic primordial sounds could correct it.
• After Michael Jackson's death in 2009 he condemned what he called a cult of drug-pushing doctors.
• He has written more than 80 books translated into 43 languages and reportedly charged up to $30,000 per lecture.