Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens died of hospital-acquired pneumonia on 15 December 2011 in the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, aged 62. In accordance with his wishes, his body was donated to medical research. "Mortality", a collection of seven of Hitchen's "Vanity Fair" essays about his illness, was published posthumously in September 2012.
Christopher Hitchens
In June 2010, Hitchens was on tour in New York promoting his memoirs "Hitch-22" when he was taken into emergency care suffering from a severe pericardial effusion. Soon after he announced he was postponing his tour to undergo treatment for esophageal cancer. In a "Vanity Fair" piece titled "Topic of Cancer", he stated that he was undergoing treatment for the cancer. He said that he recognised the long-term prognosis was far from positive, and that he would be a "very lucky person to live another five years". A heavy smoker and drinker since his teenage years, Hitchens acknowledged that these habits likely contributed to his illness. During his illness, Hitchens was under the care of Francis Collins and was the subject of Collins' new cancer treatment, which maps out the human genome and selectively targets damaged DNA.