Science and spirituality are complementary, not competitive, tools for understanding human identity, according to physician Vipul Mankad, who deals with both realms in his book When Science Meets the Soul, out now in the U.S. from Indian publishing house Astitva Prakashan.

The book arrives at a moment of broad public interest in the intersection of contemplative practice and medicine. Fittingly, When Science Meets the Soul sees Mankad, a pediatric hematologist-oncologist and biomedical scientist, draw on his career treating children with cancer and blood diseases, as well as his experience as a trained meditation practitioner rooted in Hindu philosophical traditions.

During a talk at the book's launch on March 27 at the Jung Center in Houston, Tex., Mankad referenced a chapter titled "Seriously Ill Children Become My Teachers," describing his care in 1972 for a 12-year-old patient with Hodgkin's lymphoma, which at that time was nearly always fatal.

He recounted investigating whether a new drug trial could help her. However, he recalled, the attending physician replied with clinical detachment, telling Mankad, "that chances of helping her at this stage are less than 20 percent, and that it would be for too short a time. But we will learn something from this trial and help others in the future."

Yet, the patient—identified in the book under a pseudonym—found meaning in her suffering and told Mankad: "Don't worry. I know I'm not going to make it. I don't mind if you give me the experimental treatment. Maybe this is the reason I am here."

That exchange, Mankad said, echoed the Bhagavad Gita's concept of karma yoga, which centers on performing one's duty with full skill and intent while remaining detached from outcomes.

"You have the privilege to do your duty, but not to expect results," he said. "That is how I was able to take care of children with cancer and remain mentally stable."

While book's first section takes the form of memoir, tracing Mankad's journey from childhood in India through his early career in the U.S., including stints at New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and as an endowed professor and chair of pediatrics at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, its second section moves from personal narrative to the history of human migration and genomics, examining how genes and environment shape identity.

In his talk, Mankad cited research showing that skin color accounts for just 0.1% of the human genome. "When you really begin to look at the history, it’s apparent we all came from Africa, a small group of people that spread across Eurasia and inhabited the entire world," he said. "There is so much commonality that it teaches us to treat each other as brothers and sisters."

The third section addresses consciousness and spirituality, drawing on meditation, yoga, and Hindu philosophy and its influence on the West. Given the setting of the book launch, he spoke about Carl Jung, noting that Jung's library included translations of Vedic texts commissioned by German scholar Max Müller. Mankad argued that Jung's concept of the collective unconscious closely parallels Vedic ideas about consciousness and that individual memory is layered within a collective human memory accumulated over thousands of years.

Mankad also said that Jung drew on the Hindu tradition's four paths to self-knowledge: devotion (bhakti), dutiful action (karma yoga), learning (jnana), and meditation. Where Mankad parted from Jung was on the latter's skepticism toward importing Eastern practice into Western psychology.

"Thirty million people in the U.S. are meditating," Mankad said, "and probably 300 million in the world." This is evidence, he argued, that the meditative science developed in India millennia ago has already gone global.

Mankad ultimately doesn't see his book as prescriptive. "This is not about me preaching," Mankad said. "There is one simple message here: I’m encouraging you to search for yourself."