"The one thing you end up doing in all these arenas, whether you're a clinician or scientist or fiction writer, is that you try to synthesize disparate parts into a narrative that provides new insight," said Nigam.

"Balancing creativity and rigorous analysis, you must integrate a lot of pieces of information into a coherent whole, whether you're practicing in a clinic, dealing with data in a scientific lab, or working on plots and characters while writing a novel."

And Nigam has done it all, including fiction. His second novel, Transplanted Man, was chosen as a "Year's Best Book" by Publisher's Weekly. Recently released as a Harper Perennial paperback, The Washington Post called Transplanted Man "a work of considerable intellectual and imaginative energy...a charming, frolicsome book that dares to tackle complex issues." Nigam's first novel, The Snake Charmer, published in 1998, was similarly acclaimed as "a marvelous creation" by the New York Times, and "an exceptional novel" by the Washington Post. The Utne Reader named him one of ten novelists changing the face of fiction. His fiction has been published in many languages and nominated for prestigious literary awards.

Nigam, who was born in India and grew up in Arizona, is working on another novel. He began to write at the end of his residency but only became serious while he was a postdoctoral fellow at New York's Rockefeller University, where he trained with Gunter Blobel, a Nobel Laureate. "Since I happened to be in New York, I took advantage of the literary community in the evenings," said Nigam, who wrote nights and on weekends while engaging in research during the day, a practice he continues today as Professor of Pediatrics, Medicine, and Cellular and Molecular Medicine at UCSD. Since coming to San Diego in 1999, he has held the Nancy Kaehr Chair in Pediatric Research. And recently, he was appointed the Writer-in-Residence in the Health Sciences.

Before that, Nigam was an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he rose to become Director of Research in the Renal Division of Brigham and Women's Hospital. He earned his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1982 and did his internship and residency at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

However, one of the strongest impressions on his early thinking was made not by a scientist but by a philosopher -- Ted Humphrey, chair of the philosophy department at Arizona State University, where Nigam did his undergraduate and graduate work.

"I was very young at the time," recalled Nigam, who started college at 16. "Ted took a personal interest in me and helped to foster my forays into the humanities. Having someone senior show that kind of interest motivates you to explore aspects of things in greater depth."

Today, Nigam explores how organs form and regenerate. He heads a lab of 15 researchers at UCSD. The focus of Nigam's lab is the kidney. Their work could ultimately lead to engineering of the organ. The kidney also plays an important role in the development of hypertension as well as elimination of drugs and toxins.

Hypertension and diabetes are the major causes of chronic kidney disease in adults, and about a third of all cases of kidney failure among children can be related to abnormal development. "What we're doing hopefully will be relevant to that problem in some concrete way," said Nigam.

Nigam has lectured widely on the subject both in the U.S. and abroad. Nigam has lectured widely on the subject throughout the U.S. and Canada, as well as internationally. He held visiting professorships at Harvard, Vanderbilt, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Baylor and many other institutions. In 1999, he was awarded the prestigious American Heart Association/American Society of Nephrology Young Investigator Award. The laboratory's work has been featured in magazines such as The Economist and New Scientist.

Although his lab mainly works on kidney development and tissue engineering, the group has also identified the kidney's major drug transporter that is involved in the elimination of antibiotics and anti-inflammatory agents. It is part of a larger family of genes that, together, should help physicians and biomedical scientists understand the molecular basis of drug elimination as well as the differences in how individuals handle drugs.