Dr Dattatreyudu Nori
Padma Shri, 2015 · Padma Bhushan, 2026 — Radiation Oncology
The village boy from Mantada who taught the world to place radiation inside a tumour — and then came home to tell two Telugu states that some cancers need not arrive at all.

1947, Mantada, Krishna district. Schooling in Machilipatnam. MBBS from Kurnool Medical College, postgraduate work at Osmania. Then New York: Memorial Sloan Kettering, NewYork-Presbyterian / Weill Cornell — Professor, Executive Vice Chairman of Radiation Oncology, Chairman at the Queens campus. Ladies’ Home Journal once named him among America’s top doctors for cancers in women. The American Cancer Society gave him its Tribute to Life. Ellis Island Medal of Honor, 2014. The machines and the medals were American. The village never left the name.

In 1979 he was the first physician in the United States to work with a computerised brachytherapy system. High-dose-rate remote after-loading — a source driven into the tumour, then withdrawn, so that the dose lives where the cancer lives and spare tissue is left almost unbothered. Cervix, bladder, chest, head and neck. What had been a brutal neighbour became a precise guest. He ran National Cancer Institute trials. He advised the IAEA on how developing countries should treat cancer. He helped raise cancer centres in India, South America, Israel — among them the Indo-American institute in Hyderabad that still feels, he says, like home.

In 2025 both Telugu governments made him advisor for cancer care. After the Padma Bhushan he did not speak first of Cornell.

“I have received many honours abroad, but this recognition from my country, my people and my government gives me the greatest satisfaction.” He called the award a challenge: a roadmap the two chief ministers had already accepted; a hope that certain cancers could be stopped in six or seven years if awareness arrived before the tumour. Hospitals, he said at a Hyderabad felicitation, are only a safety net between disease and recovery. The net is useless if the fall is never prevented.

A young oncologist once asked him what brachytherapy had taught him that external beams had not.

“That the shortest distance to a tumour is through the body that already owns it,” he is said to have answered. “And that the longest journey is the one back to the village that sent you.”