In a Mumbai hospital corridor, a young man in a wheelchair once looked up at the medical college gates and refused to accept the word “no.” Born on 1 August 1947 in Karachi, just days before Partition, Suresh Hariram Advani’s family fled to India and eventually settled in Mumbai. At the age of eight, polio left him with permanent locomotor disability. When he applied to Grant Medical College, authorities initially rejected him because of his wheelchair. He persisted, persuaded them, and graduated with an MBBS, later earning his MD in General Medicine.

After training in internal medicine and haematology-oncology at JJ Hospital, he travelled to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. There he worked with Nobel laureate E. Donnall Thomas, the father of bone-marrow transplantation. Returning to India, he joined Tata Memorial Hospital in 1974 and rose to become Professor and Chief of Medical Oncology. In a landmark moment, he performed one of the country’s first successful bone-marrow transplants—on a nine-year-old girl with myeloid leukaemia, using her brother’s marrow. The procedure opened a new chapter in Indian cancer care.

Over five decades he treated tens of thousands of patients, specialised in leukaemias, lymphomas, multiple myeloma, breast cancer and paediatric oncology, and helped establish formal training programmes, including the DM in Medical Oncology. He authored hundreds of scientific papers and remained a steady presence in clinics well into later years, often working long hours with the same quiet smile that patients remembered. “A smile can bring joy to many,” he would say. “Disability is only a circumstance; determination decides the path.”

The nation recognised his pioneering work with the Padma Shri in 2002 and the Padma Bhushan in 2012, along with the Dr. B.C. Roy National Award, the Dhanvantari Award and a Lifetime Achievement honour from Harvard Medical International. Together with his wife Geetha he later helped establish the Smita Memorial Hospital in Kerala in memory of their daughter.

From a childhood marked by loss and polio to the forefront of cancer treatment in India, Suresh H. Advani proved that the most powerful medicine is often courage itself—delivered from a wheelchair, with unwavering compassion and an unshakeable belief that every life deserves a chance.