Podcast appearances and mentions of Siddhartha Mukherjee

Cancer, as physician and author Siddhartha Mukherjee writes, is the emperor of all maladies. The disease—the over 200 different diseases all falling under this umbrella term—has been with us as long as we've been us. If anything is truly ancient, it is the cancer cells that are in all of our bodies, just waiting to be turned on if the conditions are right, or if our genes dictate the inevitability. Deep in wellness land, cancer is something entirely different. It's avoidable if you stop consuming seed oils, stop using 5G, stop thinking negative thoughts, and by god, stop taking those jabs that cause all the turbo cancers going around. And with every wellness warning comes a wellness solution. Today our correspondent, Mallory DeMille, returns for a deep dive into the treacherous depths of one of the more insidious grifts: treating cancer with the power of…water. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, launches a healthcare startup called Manas AI to innovate cancer treatment. Manas AI, co-founded with Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, focuses on using artificial intelligence to improve drug development processes. The startup targets aggressive cancers, including breast, prostate, and lymphoma, aiming to accelerate drug discovery and understanding of drug interactions with the human body. Manas AI secured $24.6 million in seed funding, with contributions from General Catalyst and will utilize Microsoft's data centers. Dr. Mukherjee, a professor at Columbia University, leads the integration of AI and biological sciences alongside Hoffman. The healthcare AI sector saw $10.5 billion in investments across various deals in 2024.Learn more on this news visit us at: https://greyjournal.net/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Plus, LinkedIn co-founder starts Manas AI with cancer researcher and author Siddhartha Mukherjee. And, AI recruiting startup Mercor reaches a $2 billion valuation. Julie Chang hosts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No easy wins and only tough decisions.'The Emperor Of All Maladies' by Siddhartha Mukherjee is a dense history of cancer throughout the centuries but particularly the 20th. Details breakthroughs in prevention, cure, chemotherapy, surgery, genetics and knowledge/understanding. Told from an American POV so largely uses stats from there whilst also showing how it is a global problem. Has a personal touch of his interactions with patients, scientists who discovered the next step forward and notable activists pushing for change (hence the 'biography').If you got value from the podcast please provide support back in any way you best see fit!Timeline:(00:00:00) Intro(00:02:52) Themes/Questions(00:26:31) Author & Extras(00:30:14) Summary(00:33:25) Value 4 Value(00:34:43) Join Live! Value 4 Value Support:Boostagram: https://www.meremortalspodcast.com/supportPaypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/meremortalspodcastConnect with Mere Mortals:Website: https://www.meremortalspodcast.com/Discord: https://discord.gg/jjfq9eGReUTwitter/X: https://twitter.com/meremortalspodInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/meremortalspodcast/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@meremortalspodcast

Linda Tellington-Jones, a pioneer in equine welfare and therapeutic riding, is best known for the Tellington TTouch Method. A globally celebrated horsewoman, author, and teacher, Linda has spent decades redefining equine care, integrating holistic techniques that enhance horse and rider communication. Her unique methods, which blend science, compassion, and creativity, have transformed practices in equestrian care and therapeutic settings worldwide.In this inspiring conversation, Linda shares her lifetime of wisdom on equine well-being, human and horse emotional healing, and the role of gratitude and joy in achieving optimal health.What You'll Learn in This Episode:The Foundation of Equine Welfare (Starts at 0:46): Linda discusses the importance of gratitude and recognizing the individuality of horses, emphasizing how these practices elevate both horse welfare and human-horse relationships.The Science of Cellular Wisdom (Starts at 13:05): Drawing from years of experience and studies, Linda explores the cellular intelligence within horses and humans, explaining how TTouch methods enhance physical and emotional healing.Practical Applications of TTouch (Starts at 29:34): Learn how Tellington TTouch techniques like "the lick of the cow's tongue" and "tarantulas pulling the plow" help horses overcome physical challenges like back pain and stiffness.Enhancing Equine Assisted Programs (Starts at 45:20): Discover how gratitude, art, music, and sensory exercises transform equine-assisted therapy for clients and horses, creating a joyful and healing environment.Rehabilitating Therapy Horses (Starts at 1:02:15): Linda shares strategies for incorporating therapeutic rehabilitation into equine-assisted programs, using real-life examples of transforming "crocked" horses into thriving partners.The Connection Between Gratitude, Joy, and Healing (Starts at 1:20:50): Learn how gratitude fosters joy, and how both emotions play a crucial role in physical and mental well-being for both humans and horses.Memorable Moments from the Episode:Linda's reflections on gratitude as a starting point for equine care and healing (1:15:30).Insights into the power of light touch in activating the parasympathetic nervous system and fostering deep connection (29:50).A fascinating story about releasing fear through the "lick of the cow's tongue" technique (1:01:45).Linda's innovative use of tools like Beamer Blankets and LifeWave pain patches to aid in equine rehabilitation (33:20).Resources and Further Reading:LifeWave Pain Patches: https://www.lifewave.comMan on His Nature by Sir Charles Sherrington: https://amzn.to/3DpIy4hMolecules of Emotion by Dr. Candace Pert: https://amzn.to/3P9wffmHeartMath EMWave and Heart Coherence Tools: https://www.heartmath.com/emwave/Robert Monroe and the Monroe Institute: https://www.monroeinstitute.orgHeartMath Podcasts: https://www.heartmath.com/addheartpodcast/The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee: https://amzn.to/4gsCoz0Center for Attitudinal Healing: https://www.ahinternational.orgThe Book of Ho'oponopono by Ulrich Dupree: https://amzn.to/3DtjvgZTellington TTouch Training: https://ttouch.comLearn TTouch Courses: https://learn.ttouch.caLFRF Podcast with Linda Tellington-Jones: https://ntls.co/podcastContact Linda Tellington-Jones

In this inaugural special live episode of Parola Progetto, recorded at Salotto in Brooklyn and presented in English, we are honored to host Paola Antonelli.As the Senior Curator of the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the museum's Director of Research and Development, Antonelli brings a wealth of experience and insight. During our conversation, we delve into her distinguished career at MoMA, discussing the dynamics of success and rejection, the evolving role of curating, and how museums function as research and development hubs for society. Antonelli offers her perspectives on technology, artificial intelligence, and the future of design, highlighting the critical importance of thoughtful analysis and cultural awareness in these fields.The links of this episode:Salotto, a hub for cultural research and production run by NYC-based Italian creative professionals https://salotto.nycDesign Emergency, curated by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli https://www.instagram.com/design.emergencyMoMA R&D Salons http://momarnd.moma.org/salons“Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival”, curated by Paola Antonelli at La Triennale di Milano in 2019 https://triennale.org/en/events/broken-nature “Planet City” by Liam Young https://www.moma.org/collection/works/450744 “Pirouette. Experiments and Turning Points in Design” curated by Paola Antonelli at MoMA in 2025https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5756“ITEMS. Is Fashion Modern?”, curated by Paola Antonelli at MoMA in 2018https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1638 "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer" by Siddhartha Mukherjee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_of_All_Maladies  

CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a revolutionary technology that gives scientists the ability to alter DNA. On the one hand, this tool could mean the elimination of certain diseases. On the other, there are concerns (both ethical and practical) about its misuse and the yet-unknown consequences of such experimentation. "The technique could be misused in horrible ways," says counter-terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke. Clarke lists biological weapons as one of the potential threats, "Threats for which we don't have any known antidote." CRISPR co-inventor, biochemist Jennifer Doudna, echos the concern, recounting a nightmare involving the technology, eugenics, and a meeting with Adolf Hitler. Should humanity even have access to this type of tool? Do the positives outweigh the potential dangers? How could something like this ever be regulated, and should it be? These questions and more are considered by Doudna, Clarke, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, psychologist Steven Pinker, and physician Siddhartha Mukherjee. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TRANSCRIPT: 0:41 Jennifer Doudna defines CRISPR 3:47 CRISPR's risks 4:52 Artificial selection vs. artificial mutation 6:25 Why Steven Pinker believes humanity will play it safe 9:20 Lessons from history 10:58 How CRISPR can help 11:22 Jennifer Doudna's chimeric-Hitler dream - Our ability to manipulate genes can be very powerful. It has been very powerful. - This is going to revolutionize human life. - Would the consequences be bad? And they might be. - Every time you monkey with the genome you are taking a chance that something will go wrong. - The technique could be misused in horrible ways. - When I started this research project, I've kind of had this initial feeling of what have I done. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For this "Summer Friday" we've put together some of our favorite conversations this year:Anthony Fauci, M.D., longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, now a professor at Georgetown University in the School of Medicine and the McCourt School of Public Policy, and the author of On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service (Viking, 2024), talks about his life and the public health crises the country faced.Sarah McCammon, national correspondent for NPR and the author of The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church (Macmillan, 2024), shares her story of growing up within, and leaving, evangelican Christianity, and what her reporting shows of others like her and their impact on American politics and culture.Anne Lamott, author of twenty books, including Bird by Bird and her latest, Somehow: Thoughts on Love (Riverhead Books, 2024), talks about turning 70, and why love has been the answer to the many challenges she's faced in her own life.Each year the news division hosts the WNYC Health Convening with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as an opportunity for healthcare experts and practitioners to inform WNYC's health reporting. This year, Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D., associate professor of medicine at Columbia University, cancer researcher, co-founder of MANAS.Ai, and author of several books, most recently, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human (Scribner, 2022), and Shinjini Kundu, M.D., PhD, fellow physician and computer scientist at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, and Paul Friedman, M.D., chair of the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, discuss how artificial intelligence is currently interacting with healthcare, including AI's role in diagnosing diseases, discovering the building blocks for medication, and cover concerns related to patient privacy and algorithm bias. These interviews were polished up and edited for time, the original versions are available here:Dr. Fauci Looks Back (June 28, 2024)Faith & Politics & Ex-Evangelicals (April 3, 2024)Anne Lamott on Love (May 22, 2024)A Roundtable on A.I. in Health Care (June 18, 2024)  

“Cancer” is a dreaded word in the doctor's office. But about 40% of us will be diagnosed with cancer at some point during our lives, the most common being breast, prostate, and lung cancer, according to the National Institutes of Health.But in the last few decades, major progress has been made in the world of cancer treatment and prevention. Cancer death rates have decreased by about 30% over the last quarter century, with some of the largest decreases seen in lung, melanoma, and myeloma cancers. The Biden administration's Cancer Moonshot program aims to reduce the number of cancer deaths by at least 50% by 2050.Early detection methods like mammograms and colonoscopies have improved outcomes for many types of cancer, and new treatment options, like cancer vaccines, immunotherapy, and targeted genetic therapies, have shown promising early results. And the breakthroughs made from the development of the mRNA covid vaccines are bringing even more promise for hard-to-treat cancers.Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Emperor of all Maladies: The Biography of Cancer, joins guest host John Dankosky to give a broad update on the progress made in cancer treatment and prevention. They also discuss the role AI can play in new breakthroughs, and why some cancers are still particularly difficult to treat.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Each year the news division hosts the WNYC Health Convening with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as an opportunity for healthcare experts and practitioners to inform WNYC's health reporting. This year, Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D., associate professor of medicine at Columbia University, cancer researcher, co-founder of a new company named MANAS.Ai, which integrates AI and medicine, and author of several books, most recently, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human (Scribner, 2022), Shinjini Kundu, M.D., PhD, fellow physician and computer scientist at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, and Paul Friedman,  M.D., chair of the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, discuss how artificial intelligence is currently interacting with healthcare, including AI's role in diagnosing diseases, discovering the building blocks for medication, and  concerns related to patient privacy and algorithm bias.

Recently, my brother graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, and I graduated from 8th grade. While the events were similar, they had their differences. The UPenn ceremonies were bigger and fancier but we had a really good ceremony in our school gym too. :) Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee spoke at my brother's commencement and my principal spoke at mine! Both speeches were awesome and very engaging. Here's to high school! (for me) And to a job (for my brother) Listen to the full episode for full details, and email me at Riyaramblings@gmail.com for a shout-out. (shout-out to Isabella and Kaitlyn). Remember, listen, rate, and share!

Episode Description: Elliot Hershberg, a computational biologist, writer, and investor, joins Karl and Erum to explore the fascinating intersection of technology, biology, and philosophy. ​They explore the power of technology-based newsletters, the economics of fermentation, the role of AI in biology, and the future of biotech. The conversation raises thought-provoking questions about data reliability in AI-driven platforms and the need for cautious optimism in embracing new technologies. With insights into the minds of VCs and the potential implications of building a sentient AI, this episode offers a captivating glimpse into the exciting advancements and possibilities in the world of biotech! Grow Everything brings the bioeconomy to life. Hosts Karl Schmieder and Erum Azeez Khan share stories and interview the leaders and influencers changing the world by growing everything. Biology is the oldest technology. And it can be engineered. What are we growing? Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.messaginglab.com/groweverything⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Chapters: 00:00:00 - Synbiobeta Week: The Pulse of Biotech Innovation 00:01:12 - Microbiome Frontiers: From Netflix Documentaries to Real-World Applications 00:04:27 - Algae Chronicles: A Dive into Nature's Ingenious Endosymbionts 00:06:18 - The ChatGPT Phenomenon in Biotech: Conversing with Elliot Hirschberg 00:08:57 - Elliot Hershberg: Penning the Path from Literature to Biotech Breakthroughs 00:11:42 - Navigating the Biotech Labyrinth: Unraveling Complexities 00:15:26 - Biotech Ethos: Pondering the Universe Through a Biological Lens 00:17:58 - Elliot's Odyssey: Crafting 'Not Boring' Narratives in Biotech Finance 00:21:07 - The Biotech Think Tank: Cultivating Ideas 00:24:18 - BioTech Crossroads: Envisioning the Fusion of Life Sciences and Tech 00:27:28 - Quantum Biology: Unveiling the Microscopic Mysteries 00:29:31 - Machine Learning: The New Catalyst in Biological Discovery 00:31:31 - Blueprint for Biotech Trailblazers: Nurturing Innovation 00:32:52 - Venture Capital Visions: Sowing Seeds in Fertile Biotech Grounds 00:35:37 - Newsletters: The DNA of Biotech Knowledge Sharing 00:37:43 - Biomanufacturing Horizons: Shaping the Fabric of Future Production 00:42:38 - AI: The New Author and Architect in Biotech 00:45:39 - Biotech Forecasts: Charting the Uncharted 00:51:06 - Biotech Chronicles: Penning the Progress and Profits Episode Links: Not Boring Capital (link) Elliot Hershberg on LinkedIn The Century of Biology (link) Atomic AI (link) The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee  (link) The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee (link) The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee (link) Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech by Sally Smith Hughes (link) For Blood and Money: Billionaires, Biotech, and the Quest for a Blockbuster Drug by Nathan Vardi (link) Molecular Biology Of The Cell by Bruce Alberts et al (link) Get $300 off ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Synbiobeta tickets⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (May 6-9 in San Jose, CA) using promo code: Grow Everything Topics Covered:  colors, textile dyes, fabrics, fashion, bioreactors, synthetic biology, synbio, bioengineering, organism engineering, microbiology Have a question or comment? Message us here: Text or Call (804) 505-5553 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Youtube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ / ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠GrowEverything website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email: groweverything@messaginglab.com Support here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Music by: Nihilore Production by: Amplafy Media --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/messaginglab/message

The discovery of the cell in the 17th century caused a paradigm shift in medicine, with the human body coming to be seen as something never before imagined: an ecosystem in and of itself; a collection of innumerable organic parts working in tandem to fulfill our biological functions. Physician and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee sits down with David M. Rubenstein to explore how this watershed moment came about and how its effects are still playing out in the form of radical medical advancements that draw into sharper relief what it means to be human.  Recorded on December 13, 2022

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a Professor at Columbia University, oncologist, and extraordinary author of Emperor of All Maladies (which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize), The Gene, and The Song of the Cell, along with outstanding pieces in the New Yorker. He is one of the top thought leaders in medicine of our era. “I have begun to imagine, think about what it would be to be a digital human..”—Sid MukherjeeEric Topol (00:06):Well, hello, this is Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and I am delighted to have my friend Sid Mukherjee, to have a conversation about all sorts of interesting things. Sid, his most recent book, SONG OF THE CELL is extraordinary. And I understand, Sid, you're working on another book that may be cell related. Is that right?Sid Mukherjee  (00:30):Eric, it's not cell related, I would say, but it's AI and death related, and it covers, broadly speaking, it covers AI, longevity and death and memory —topics that I think are universal, but also particularly medicine.Eric Topol (00:57):Well, good, and we'll get into that. I had somehow someone steered me that your next book was going to be something building on the last one, but that sounds even more interesting. You're going in another direction. You've covered cancer gene cells, so I think covering this new topic is of particularly interest. So let's get into the AI story and maybe we'll start off with your views on the healthcare side. Where do you think this is headed now?A.I. and Drug DiscoverySid Mukherjee  (01:29):So I think Eric, there are two very broad ways of dividing where AI can enter healthcare, and there may be more, I'm just going to give you two, but there may be more. One is on what I would call the deep science aspect of it, and by that I mean AI-based drug discovery, AI-based antibody discovery, AI-based modeling. All of which use AI tools but are using tools that have to do with machine learning, but may have to do less directly with the kind of large language models. These tools have been in development for a long time. You and I are familiar with them. They are tools. Very simply put, you can imagine that the docking of a drug to a protein, so imagine every drug, every medicine as a small spaceship that docks onto a large spaceship, the large spaceship being the target.(02:57):So if you think of it that way, there are fundamental rules. If anyone's watched Star Wars or any of these sci-fi films, there are fundamental rules by which that govern the way that the small spaceship in this case, a molecule like aspirin fits into a pocket of its target, and those are principles that are determined entirely by chemistry and physics, but they can be taught, you can learn what kind of spaceship or molecule is likely to fit into what kind of pocket of the mothership, in this case, the target. And if they can be learned, they're amenable to AI-based discovery.Eric Topol (03:57):Right. Well, that's, isn't that what you'd call the fancy term structure-based discovery, where you're using such tools like what AlphaFold2 for proteins and then eventually for antibodies, small molecules, et cetera, that you can really rev up the whole discovery of new molecules, right?Sid Mukherjee  (04:21):That's correct, and that's one of the efforts that I'm very heavily involved in. We have created proprietary algorithms that allow us to enable this. Ultimately, of course, there has to be a method by which you start from these AI based methods, then move to physical real chemistry, then move to real biology, then move to obviously human biology and ultimately to human studies. It's a long process, but it's an incredibly fruitful process.Eric Topol (04:57):Well, yeah, as an example that recently we had Jim Collins on the podcast and he talked about the first new drug class of antibiotics in two decades that bind to staph aureus methicillin resistant, and now in clinical trials. So it's happening. There's 20 AI drugs in clinical trials out there.Sid Mukherjee  (05:18):It's bound to happen. It is an unstoppable bound to happen systematology of drug discovery. This is just bound to happen. It is unstoppable. There are kinks in it in the road, but those will be ironed out, but it's bound to happen.(05:41):So that's on the very discovery oriented end, which is more related to learning algorithms that have to do with AI and less to do with what we see in day-to-day life, the ChatGPT kind of day-to-day life of the world. On the very other end of the spectrum, just to move along on the very other end of the spectrum are what I would call patient informatics. So by patient informatics, I mean questions like who responds to a particular drug? What genes do they have? What environment are they in? Have they had other drug interactions in the past? What is it about their medical record that will allow us to understand better why or why they're not responding to a medicine?(06:51):Those are also AI, can also be really powered by AI, but are much more dependent and much more sensitive to our understanding of these current models, the large language models. So just to give you an example, let's say you wanted to enroll a clinical trial for patients with diabetes to take a new drug. You could go into the electronic medical record, which right now is a text file, and ask the question, have they or have they not responded to the standard agents? And what has their response been? Should they be on glucose monitoring? How bad is their diabetes based on some laboratory parameters, et cetera, et cetera. So that's a very different information rich, electronic medical record rich mechanism to understand how to develop medicines. One lies, the first lies way in the discovery end of the spectrum. The second lies way in the clinical trials and human drug exposure end of the spectrum. And of course, there are things in the middle that I haven't iterated, but those are the two really broad categories where one can imagine AI making a difference and to be fair through various efforts, I'm working on both of those, the two end spectrum.A.I. and CancerEric Topol (08:34):Well, let's drill down a bit more on the person individual informatics for a moment, since you're an oncologist, and the way we screen for cancer today is completely ridiculous by age only. But if you had a person's genome sequence, polygenic risk scores for cancers and all the other known data that, for example, the integrity of their immune system response, environmental exposures, which we'll talk about in a moment more, wouldn't we do far better for being able to identify high risk people and even preventing cancer in the future?Sid Mukherjee  (09:21):So I have no doubt whatsoever that more information that we can analyze using intelligent platforms. And I'm saying all of these words are relevant, more information analyzed through intelligent platforms. More information by itself is often useless. Intelligent platforms without information by themselves are often useless, but more information with intelligent platforms, that combination can be very useful. And so, one use case of that is just to give you one example, there are several patients, women who have a family history of breast cancer, but who have no mutations in the known single monogenic breast cancer risk genes, BRCA1, BRCA2, and a couple of others. Those patients can be at a high a risk of breast cancer as patients who have BRCA1 and BRCA2. It's just that their risk is spread out through not one gene but thousands of genes. And those patients, of course have to be monitored and their risk is high, and they need to understand what the risk is and how to manage it.(10:57):And that's where AI can, and first of all, informatics and then AI can play a big difference because we can understand how to manage those patients. They used to be called, this is kind of, I don't mean this lightly, but they used to be called BRCA3 because they didn't have BRCA1, they didn't have BRCA2, but they had a constellation of genes, not one, not two, but thousands of genes that would increase their risk of breast cancer just a little bit. I often describe these as nudge genes as opposed to shove genes. BRCA1 and BRCA2 are shoved genes. They shove you into having a high risk of breast cancer. But you can imagine that there are nudge genes as well in which they, in which a constellation of not one, not two, not three, but a thousand genetic variations, give a little push each one, a little push towards having a higher risk of breast cancer.(12:09):Now, the only way to find these nudge genes is by doing very clever informatic studies, some of which have been done in breast cancer, ovarian cancer, cardiovascular diseases, other diseases where you see these nudge effects, small effects of a single gene, but accumulated across a thousand, 2000, 3000 genes, an effect that's large enough that it's meaningful. And I think that we need to understand those. And once we understand them, I think we need to understand what to do with these patients. Do we screen them more assertively? Do we recommend therapies? You can get more aggressive, less aggressive, but of course that demands clinical trials and a deeper understanding of the biology of what happens.A.I. And LongevityEric Topol (13:10):Right, so your point about the cumulative effects of small variants, hundreds and hundreds of these variants being equivalent potentially, as we've seen across many diseases, it's really important and you're absolutely right about that. And I've been pushing for trying to get these polygenic risk scores into clinical routine use, and hopefully we're getting closer to that. And that's just as you say, just one layer of this information to add to the intelligence platform. Now, the next thing that you haven't yet touched on connecting the dots is, can AI and informatics be used to promote longevity?Sid Mukherjee  (13:55):Yeah, so that's a very interesting question. Let me attack that question in two ways. One biological and one digital. The biological one is to understand, again, the biological one has to do with informatics. So we could use AI so that, imagine that there are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of variables. You happen to live on a Mediterranean island, you happen to walk five miles a day, you happen to have a particular diet, you happen to have a particular genetic makeup, you happen to have a particular immunological makeup, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All of those you happen to have, you happen to have, you happen to have. Now, if we could collect all of this data across hundreds of thousands of individuals, we'd need a system to deconvolute the data and ask the question, what is it about these 750,000 individuals that predicted longevity? Was it the fact that they walked five miles a day? Was it  their genetic makeup? Was it their diet? Was it their insulin level? Was it their, so you can imagine an n-dimensional diagram, as it were, and to deconvolute that n-dimensional diagram and to figure out what was the driving force of their longevity, you would need much more than conventional information analysis. You need AI.(15:58):So that's one direction that one could use. Again, informatics to figure out longevity. A second direction, completely independent of the first is to ask the question, what are the biological determinants of longevity in other animals? Is it insulin levels? Is it chronic? Is it the immune system? Is it the lack of, and we'll come back to this question, is it as you very well know, people with extreme longevity, the so-called supercentenarians. Interestingly, the supercentenarians don't generally die of cancer and heart disease, which are the two most common killers of people in their 70s and 80s in most countries of the western world. They die typically of what I would call regenerative failure. Their immune systems collapse. Their stem cells can't make enough skin, so they get skin infections, their skin collapses, they get bone defects, and they die of fractures. They get neurological defects, they die of neurodegenerative diseases and so forth. So they die of true degenerative diseases as opposed to cancer and heart disease, which have been the plagues of human biology since the beginning of time.(17:49):Again, I'm talking about the western world, of course, a different story with infectious diseases elsewhere. So a different way to approach the problem would be to say, what are the regenerative blockades that prevent regeneration at a biological level for these patients? And ask the question whether we can overcome these regenerative blockades using, again, the systems that I described before. What are they? What are the checkpoints? What are the mechanisms? And could we encourage the body to override those mechanisms? We still have to deal with heart disease and cancer, but once we had dealt with heart disease and cancer, we would have to ask the question. Okay, now we've dealt with those two things. What are the regenerative blockades that prevent people from having longevity once we've overcome those two big humps, heart disease and cancer?Eric Topol (19:00):Yeah, no, I think you're bringing up a really fascinating topic. And as you know, there's been many different ideas for how to achieve that, whether that's the senolytic drugs or getting rid of dead cells or using the transcription factors of cells instead of going into induced pluripotent stem cells, but rather to go to a rejuvenation of cells. Are you optimistic that eventually we're going to crack this case of better approach to regeneration?Sid Mukherjee  (19:33):Oh, I'm extremely optimistic. I'm optimistic, but I'm optimistic to a point. And that brings me to the third place, which is I'm optimistic to a point, which is that you conquer in some, hopefully you conquer a major part of heart disease and cancer, and now you're up against cellular regeneration. You then conquer cellular regeneration. And I don't know what the next problem is going to be. It's going to be some new hurdle. So I think there are two solutions to that hurdle. One solution is to say, okay, there's a new hurdle. We'll solve that new hurdle and it's bit by bit extending longevity year by year, by year by year as it were. But a completely second solution occurs to me, and here I'm going completely off script, Eric, which is what I do in my life.Going Off Script: Being A Digital Human(20:45):I have begun to imagine, think about what it would be to be a digital human and by a digital human I mean, it began with my father's death. My father passed away a few years ago, and I would sometimes enter a kind of psychic space, what I would call a psychomanteum, in which I would imagine myself asking him questions about critical moments in my life, make a critical decision. I would rely on my father to make that decision for me. He would give me advice. That advice had some stereotypical qualities about it. Think about this, think about that. My experience has been this. My life has been this. My life has been that. But of course, times change. And I began to wonder whether with the use of digital technologies and digital AI technologies in particular, what could create a simulacrum of a psychomanteum?(22:06):So in other words, your physical body would pass, but somehow your digital body, all the memories, the experiences, the learning, all of that, that you had, the emotional connections that you had formed in your lifetime would somehow remain and would remain in a kind of psychomanteum in which you could go into a room. And again, I'm not talking voodoo science here. I'm talking very particular ways of extracting information from a person's decision making, extracting information about a person's ideas about the word their sort of their schema, or as psychologists describe it, the schemata. So that in some universe, if my father downloaded passively or actively the kind of decision making, not the actual decisions, the form of decision making and the form of communication that he liked, that I could go back to him eternally. My grandchildren could go back to him eternally and ask the question, great grandpa, what would you do under these circumstances? And what's amazing about it is that this is not completely science fiction.Eric Topol (23:45):Not at all.Sid Mukherjee  (23:46):It is within the realms of reality in the sense of there's no digital limitation to it. The main limitation to it is information. So Eric Topol, you make decisions I would imagine with some kind of stereotypical wisdom, you have accumulated wisdom in your life. You think about things in a particular critical way. When you read a book, you read a book in a particular way, it's whatever it might be. And Eric Topol psychomanteum would be, I would go into a space and see you and ask you a question, Eric, you read this book, what did you think about it? You found this piece of evidence. Read this scientific paper. What do you think about it? And so forth.(24:49):So again, let me just go back to my first point, which is number one, I think that regenerative medicine will have a regenerative moment itself, and we will discover new medicines, new mechanisms by which we can extend lifespan. Number two, that will involve getting over two big humps that we have right now, cancer and heart disease. Hopefully we'll get over both of those at some point of time. And number three, that in parallel, we will find a way to create digital selves that even when our physical bodies decay and die, that we will have a sense of eternal longevity based on digital selves, which is accessible or readily accessible through AI mechanisms. Yeah, this spectrum, I think will change our ideas of what longevity means.The Environmental FactorsEric Topol (26:10):Well, I think your idea about the digital human and the brain and the decision making and that sort of thing is really well founded by the progress being made in the brain machine interface, as you know, with basically the mind is being digitized and you can get cells to talk, to speak to a person, and all sorts of things that are happening right now that are basically deconvoluting brain function at the cellular, even molecular neural level. So I don't think it's farfetched at all. I'm glad you went off script, Sid. That's great. Now this, I want to get back to something you brought up earlier because there are a lot of obstacles as you will acknowledge. And one of them is that we have in our environment horrible issues about pollution, about carcinogens, the focus of your recent New Yorker piece, plastics, microplastics, nanoplastics, now found in our arteries and brains and causing more, as we just recently saw, more heart attack, strokes and death, and of course the climate crisis. So with all this great science that we've just been discussing, our environment's going to hell, and I want to get your comments because you had a very insightful piece as always in the New Yorker in December about this, and I know you've been thinking about it, that the obstacles are getting worse to override the problems that we have today, don't you think?Sid Mukherjee  (27:55):So you're absolutely right. If we go down this path, we are going to go to hell in eye baskets. What we haven't discounted for is really decades, if not possibly a century of research that shows that there are certain kinds of inflammatory agents that cause both cancer, heart disease, and inflammation that have to do with their capacity to be so foreign to the human body that they're recognized as alien objects and so alien that our immune systems can't handle them. And essentially send off what I would call a five-bell alarm, saying that here's something that the immune system can't handle. It's beyond the capacity. And that five-bell alarm, as we now know, unfortunately, causes a systemic inflammatory response. And that systemic inflammatory response can potentiate heart disease, cancer, and maybe many other diseases that we don't know about because we haven't looked.Eric Topol (29:28):Absolutely.Sid Mukherjee  (29:29):So to connect this back to climate change, pollution is one of them. Air pollution is absolutely one of them. Microplastics, undegradable sort of forever plastics are one of them, or some of them. I think that there is no way around it except to really find a systematic way of assessing them. Look, it is wonderful to have new materials in the world. I'm wearing a jacket made out of God knows what, it's not cloth. I don't know what you are wearing, Eric, but it may not be cloth. These are great materials. This keeps the rain away. But on the other hand, it may be shedding something that I don't know. We need to find scientific ways of assessing the safety and the validity of some new materials that we bring into the world. And the way that we do that is to ask the question, is it inflammatory? Is there something that we are missing? Is there something about it that we should be thinking about that we haven't thought about?Eric Topol (31:02):Well, and to that end, you've been a very, I think, astute observer about diet as it relates to cancer. And we know similarly, as we just talked about with our environment, there's the issue of ultra-processed foods, and we've got big food, we got big plastics, big tobacco. I mean, we have all these counter forces to what the science is showing.Sid Mukherjee  (31:29):Too many bigs.Eric Topol (31:31):Yeah, yeah. But I guess the net of it is, Sid, if I get it right, you think that the progress we're making in science, and that includes the things we've talked about and genome editing and accelerated drug discovery, these sorts of programs, the informatics, the AI can override this chasing of our tail with basically unchecked issues that are, whether it's from our nutrition, our air, what we ingest and breathe, these are some serious problems.Preventing DiseasesSid Mukherjee  (32:06):No, I don't think that. I don't think that cancer and cardiovascular disease prevention, as you very well know, Eric, because you've been in the forefront of it, is a pyramid. The base of the pyramid is prevention. Prevention is the most effective. It's the most difficult. It's the hardest to understand, the most difficult trials to incorporate, but it is the base of the pyramid. And so let it be said that I don't think that we're going to solve cancer, cardiovascular disease by better treatment using CRISPR. My laboratory, and one of my companies before I happened to be wearing the jacket, but was one of the first to use CRISPR and transplant CRISPR. CRISPR, human beings with or CRISPR bone marrow into human beings long before anyone else, we were actually among the first. These human beings, thankfully, and astonishingly remain completely alive. We deleted a gene from their bone marrow. They engrafted with no problem. They're still alive today, and we are treating them for cancer. Astonishing fact, there are 12 of them in the world.(33:49):And again, astonishing fact, wonderful, beautiful news, beautiful science. But there are 12, if we want to make a big change in the universe, we need to get not to 12, but to 12 million, potentially 120 million. And that's not going to happen because we're going to CRISPR their bone marrow. It's going to happen because we change their environments, their diets, their lifestyles, their exposures, we understand their risks, their genetics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's not going to happen because we give them CRISPR bone marrow transplants that enable them to change their risk of cancer. So I'm very clear about this or clear eyed about it, I would say, which is to say that great progress in medicine is being made. There's no doubt about it. I'm happy about it. I'm happy to be part of it. I'm happy to be in the forefront of it.(35:00):We have now delivered one of the first cellular therapies for cancer in India at a price point that really challenges the price point of the west. We are now producing this commercially and or about to produce this commercially, so for lymphomas and leukemias, I'm so excited about the progress in science. But all of that said, let me be very clear, the real progress in cancer and cardiovascular disease is going to come from prevention. And if that's where we're going, we need to really rethink at a very fundamental level as you have Eric, at a very fundamental level, how do we rethink prevention, cancer prevention, cardiovascular disease prevention, and as a correlate, regenerative disease, regeneration, cancer prevention, cardiovascular disease prevention. The fundamentals are how do we find things that are in our exposome, things that we're exposed to environments, gene environment interactions that increase the risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease, and how do we take them out? And how do we do this without running 15-year trials so that we can get the results now? And that's what I'm really interested in in terms of information.Eric Topol (36:55):Yeah. Well, I'm with you there. And just to go along with those 12 patients you mentioned, as you know recently it was reported there were 15 patients with serious autoimmune diseases, and they got a therapy to knock out all their B cells. And when their B cells came back, they didn't make autoantibodies anymore. And this was dermatomyositis and lupus and systemic sclerosis, and it was pretty magical. If it can be extended, like you said, okay, 15 people, just like your 12, if you can do that in millions, well, you can get rid of autoimmune diseases, which would be a nice contribution. I mean, there's so many exciting things going on right now that we've touched on, but as you get to it, you've already approached this inequity issue by bringing potentially very expensive treatments that are exciting to costs that would be applicable in India and many countries that are not in the rich income category. So this is a unique time it seems like Sid, in our advances, in the cutting edge progress that's being made, wouldn't you say?The Why on Cancer in the YoungSid Mukherjee  (38:14):Well, I would say that the two advances have to go hand in hand. There will be patients who are recalcitrant to the standard therapies, your patients with severe lupus dermatitis, et cetera. Those patients will require cutting edge therapy, and we will find ways to deliver it to them. There are other patients, hundreds of not 12, not 15, but hundreds of thousands if not millions, who will require an understanding of why there is an increase, for instance, in asthmatics disease in India. Why is that increasing? Why is there an increase in non-smoking related lung cancer in some parts of the world? Why? What's driving that? Why is there an increase in young patients with cancers in the United States? Of all things that stand out, there is a striking increase in colorectal cancer in young men and women. There's an increase in esophageal cancer in young men and women. Why?Eric Topol (39:58):Yeah, why, why?Sid Mukherjee  (40:00):Why? And so, the answer to that question lies in understanding the science, getting deeper information informatics, and then potentially understanding the why. So again, I draw the distinction between two broad classes of spaces where information science can make a big difference. On one hand, on the very left hand of the picture, an understanding of how to make new medicines for patients who happen to have these diseases. And on the way right hand of finding out why these patients are there in the first place, and asking the question, why is it that there are more patients, young men and women with colorectal cancer, are we eating something? Is it our diet? Is it our diet plus our environment? Is it the diet plus environment plus genetics? But why? There must be a why. When you have a trend like this, there's always a why. And if there's a why, there's always an answer. Why? And we have the best tools, and this is the positive piece of this. The positive piece of this is that we now have among the best tools that we've ever had to answer that why? And that's what makes me optimistic. Not a drug, not a medicine, not a fancy program, but the collective set of tools that we have that allow us to answer the question why? Because that is of course the question that every patient with esophageal and colorectal cancer is asking why.Eric Topol (42:01):I'm with you. What you're bringing up is fundamental. We have the tools, but we've noted this increase in colon cancer in the young for several years, and we're not any closer to understanding the why yet, right?Sid Mukherjee  (42:18):Yes. We're not any closer to understanding the why yet. Part of the answer is that we haven't delved into the why properly enough. These are studies that take time. They have longitude because these are studies that have to do with prevention. They take time, they take patients. So the quick answer to your question is, I don't think we've made the effort and we haven't made the effort, especially with the technological advances that we have today. So imagine for a second that we launched a project in which, again, like the Manhattan project, the Apollo project, we advanced a project which said the colorectal cancer in young project in the United States, we brought the best science minds together and ask the question, go into a room, lock yourself up, and don't come out of the room until you have the answer to figuring out how and then why we have young men and women with colorectal cancer increasing. I would imagine you could nominate, I could nominate 10 people to that committee and they would willingly serve. They'd be willing to be locked up in a room and ask the question why? Because they want to answer that question. That why is extraordinarily important.Eric Topol (44:14):I'm with you on that too, because we have the tools, like you said, we can assess the gut microbiome, their genome, their diets, their environmental exposures and figure this out. But as you say, there hasn't been a commitment to doing it.Sid Mukherjee  (44:30):And that commitment has to come centrally, right? That commitment has to come from the NIH, that has to come from the NCI, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Health. It has to come as a mechanism that says, listen, let's solve this problem. So identifying the problem, there's an increase in colorectal cancer in young people. Important. Yes. Let's, let's figure out the answer why, and let's collect all the information for the next five years, seven years, whatever it might take to answer that question.Eric Topol (45:18):And as you said, the intelligent platforms will help analyze it.Sid Mukherjee  (45:23):Yes. I mean, we have the tools. So if you have the tools and if you collect the information, the tools will analyze that information.Eric Topol (45:36):Right. Well, this has been inspiring and daunting at the same time, this discussion. What I love about you, Sid, is you're a big thinker. You're one of the great thinkers in medicine of our era, and you also of course are such an extraordinary writer. So we're going to look forward to your next book and your rejuvenation of the cancer Emperor of All Maladies book but I want to thank you. I always enjoy our discussions. They always get to areas that highlight where we're missing the opportunities that we have that we're not actualizing. That's one of the many things I really love about you and your work, so keep up the good stuff and I look forward to the next chance we get to visit and discuss all this stuff.Sid Mukherjee  (46:31):And it's been a great pleasure knowing you for so many years, Eric. And then whenever we have dinner together, the dinner always begins with my asking you why. And so, the why question is the first question. The how question is a harder question. We can always answer the how question, but the why question is the first question. So the next time I have dinner with you, wherever it might be, San Diego, New York, Los Angeles, I'm going to ask you another why question. And you're going to answer the how question, because that's what you're good at. And it's been such a pleasure interacting with you for so many years.Eric Topol (47:12):Oh, thank you so much. What a great friend.Thanks for listening/reading to this Ground Truths conversation.If you found it stimulating, please share with your colleagues and friends.All content on Ground Truths—newsletter analyses and podcasts—is free.Voluntary paid subscriptions all go to support Scripps Research.Ground Truths now has a YouTube channel for all the podcasts. Here's a list of the people I've interviewed that includes a few that will soon be posted or are scheduled. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

I met with Jon Rees, another TOK Teacher (as well as teacher of Human Technologies and IB English) here in Hong Kong, and we discussed TOK Exhibition Prompt 23: How important are material tools in the production or acquisition of knowledge? It was a fascinating discussion! Students, you need to be careful in this question about the difference between producing knowledge and producing things. While there is a connection (knowledge is needed to produce things), it is not an obvious connection so an exploration of the knowledge being produced (not just the thing) is required here. I think it would be very hard to argue that material tools (and conceptual tools by extension?) are not essential - and yet there's room for exploration as you can hear from our conversation. I hope to talk with Mr. Rees again soon, as it was a very interesting and thought provoking conversation. Books & Resources that we referenced and discussed in relation to this talk (for links to all of these, check out www.TOKTalk.org): ‘Sapiens' by Yuval Noah Harari - this book is essentially an exploration of the role of material tools in the development of humankind, but is especially interesting when he talks about “fictional realities”. ‘Techno Feudalism' by Yanis Varoufakis - he does a great job from a Marxist perspective explaining how his father taught him the concept of historical materialism, how technological development creates the tools/conditions for the advancement of the socio-cultural context. Then who controls the means of production, power/authority. ‘How to Understand E= MC2' by Christophe Galfard ‘The Sane Society' by Eric Fromm - criticism of our focus on consumption in a nuclear age where we can annihilate ourselves ‘Song of the Cell' by Siddhartha Mukherjee - deep exploration of our understanding of biology - the first chapters are specifically focused on development of the microscope and its influence on the entire field of microbiology and beyond ‘Guns Germs Steel' by Jared Diamond outlines the theory of geographic determinism, and thus the access to materials and the tools we can therefore make are everything in the development of humankind ‘Knowledge Illusion' by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach - the illusion of explanatory depth, mistaking shared knowledge for our own Justice with Michael Sandel Little Museum of the World in Chai Wan - A time machine for building peace ‘The Vanishing Face of Gaia', by James Lovelock - essential wake-up call for humankind ‘Donut Economics' by Kate Raworth - a hopeful perspective! Nibbling away what we need (not beyond our planetary boundaries) Special Guest: Jon Rees Music from the ISF Student Brass Band playing outside the school gate one morning in December 2023

Cancer, at its core, is a genetic disease: the result of DNA mutations that cause cells to grow out of control and develop tumors. And over the years, scientists have identified certain chemicals, called carcinogens, that are directly linked to those cancer-causing mutations, like those found in cigarettes.But the rates of some cancers, like colorectal and lung, are rising dramatically in certain populations, leaving scientists to wonder what carcinogens they might be missing, and how traditional models of detecting them are falling short.Last year, a landmark study published in the journal Nature confirmed a theory that toxicologists and cancer researchers had long suspected: that certain chemicals, like those found in air pollution, may not directly lead to cancerous mutations, but instead prime already vulnerable mutated cells to become cancerous. Some scientists have dubbed these chemicals “dark matter” carcinogens; they know they're out there, exerting some kind of effect on increasing cancer rates, but they don't fully understand what these chemicals are.Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, wrote about this scientific detective mystery in The New Yorker. This week, he joins Ira to talk about how scientists are rethinking their approach to identifying carcinogens, and why he's hopeful for the future of cancer research in light of this new paradigm.Transcripts for this segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. To stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Neo Nostromo #65 - Nuestras Mejores Lecturas en 2023. Más vale tarde que nunca: las velocidades relativistas a las que la Neo Nostromo explora el universo del género fantástico hace que para el resto de la humaniad parezca haber pasado más de un mes desde que acabó el 2023, pero para nosotros hace apenas unos segundos. Hoy compartimos con vosotros las lecturas que más nos han hecho disfrutar durante 2023 y... También algunas de las que menos. Esperamos que disfrutéis del programa. Lista de libros mencionados: - La Vieja Sangre, de Álfredo Álamo. - Chainsaw Man, de Tatsuki Fujimoto. - Mónica, de Daniel Clowes. - Tress of the Emerald Sea, de Brandon Sanderson. - The Shards, de Bret Easton Ellis. - The Mountain in the Sea, de Ray Nayler. - El Libro Azul de Nebo, de Manon Steffan Ros. - Palabras del Egeo, de Pedro Olalla. - El Gen. Una Historia Íntima, de Siddhartha Mukherjee. - Eversion, de Alastair Reynolds. - The Blighted Stars, de Megan O'Keefe. - Lost Stars, de Claudia Gray. - Talonsister, de Jenn Williams. - Cuentos de Terramar, de Ursula K. Le Guin. - Gods of the Wyrdwood, de RJ. Barker. - Mañana, y Mañana, y Mañana, de Gabrielle Zevin. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/neo-nostromo/message

Chapter 1 What's The Gene Book by Siddhartha MukherjeeThe Gene: An Intimate History is a book written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-American physician and writer. Published in 2016, the book explores the history, science, and ethical implications of genes, genetics, and the field of genomics. It delves into various topics such as hereditary diseases, genetic engineering, the role of genes in shaping our identities, and the future of genetic research. The Gene received critical acclaim and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the nonfiction category. It is regarded as an engaging and accessible exploration of the complex subject of genetics.Chapter 2 Is The Gene Book A Good BookYes, "The Gene: An Intimate History" by Siddhartha Mukherjee is widely considered to be a good book. It has received positive reviews from both critics and readers alike. The book explores the history and science behind genetics and gene research, delving into the discovery of genes, their impact on human lives, and the ethical implications of genetic manipulation. Mukherjee's writing style is engaging and accessible, making complex scientific concepts easily understandable for the general audience. Overall, "The Gene" is highly recommended for those interested in genetics and its impact on society.Chapter 3 The Gene Book by Siddhartha Mukherjee SummaryThe Gene Book by Siddhartha Mukherjee is a comprehensive exploration of the history, science, and implications of genetics. Throughout the book, Mukherjee delves into the origins of genetics, starting with the discovery of DNA and the early understanding of inheritance.Mukherjee also delves into the revolutionary discoveries made in the field of genetics, such as the mapping of the human genome and the development of techniques to manipulate and edit genes. He explores the ethical and moral questions that arise from these advancements, discussing topics like designer babies, gene therapy, and genetic testing.The book also includes personal anecdotes and stories from Mukherjee's own family, as he has a history of mental illness in his family. He discusses the genetic component of mental illness and the search for genetic markers that can help in diagnosis and treatment.Throughout the book, Mukherjee emphasizes the complexity of genetics and the interplay between genes and environmental factors. He challenges the notion of genetic determinism and highlights the importance of understanding genetics in a broader context.In summary, The Gene Book by Siddhartha Mukherjee is a thought-provoking exploration of the history, science, and ethical considerations surrounding genetics. It provides a comprehensive overview of the field while also delving into personal stories and issues of societal importance. Chapter 4 The Gene Book AuthorSiddhartha Mukherjee is an Indian-American physician, scientist, and writer. He was born on July 21, 1970, in New Delhi, India. Mukherjee is renowned for his book "The Gene: An Intimate History," which was published on May 17, 2016."The Gene: An Intimate History" explores the history, discovery, and implications of the gene, giving insights into its role in heredity, evolution, and human existence. The book received critical acclaim and won several awards, including the 2017 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize.In addition to "The Gene," Siddhartha Mukherjee has also written a book called "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer," which was published in 2010. This book chronicles the history of cancer, including its potential causes, treatments, and ongoing

The world is changing fast. Technology can be used to empower us -- and also to hack our brains & our lives. What laws do we need to protect our freedoms? Rahul Matthan joins Amit Varma in episode 360 of The Seen and the Unseen to share his work on privacy -- and on a new, subtle approach towards data governance. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.)   Also check out: 1. Rahul Matthan on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Trilegal, Substack and his own website. 2. Privacy 3.0: Unlocking Our Data-Driven Future -- Rahul Matthan. 3. The Third Way: India's Revolutionary Approach to Data Governance -- Rahul Matthan. 4. The Life and Times of KP Krishnan -- Episode 355 of The Seen and the Unseen. 5. Sudhir Sarnobat Works to Understand the World -- Episode 350 of The Seen and the Unseen. 6. Roam Research. 7. Zettelkasten on Wikipedia. 8. Tana, Obsidian and Notion. 9. Getting Things Done -- David Allen. 10. The Greatest Productivity Mantra: Kaator Re Bhaaji! -- Episode 11 of Everything is Everything. 11. Hallelujah (Spotify) (YouTube) -- Leonard Cohen. 12. Hallelujah (Spotify) (YouTube) -- Jeff Buckley. 13. The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah" -- Alan Light. 14. Hallelujah on Revisionist History by Malcolm Gladwell. 15. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life -- Anne Lamott. 16. The New Basement Tapes. (Also Wikipedia.) 17. Kansas City -- Marcus Mumford. 18. The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial -- Venkatesh Rao. 19. Vitalik Buterin Fights the Dragon-Tyrant — Episode 342 of The Seen and the Unseen. 20. Paul Graham on Twitter and his own website. (His essays are extraordinary.) 21. Ribbonfarm by Venkatesh Rao. 22. The Network State --  Balaji Srinivasan. 23. Marc Andreessen on Twitter. 24. The Techno-Optimist Manifesto -- Marc Andreessen. 25. Siddhartha Mukherjee and Carlo Rovelli on Amazon. 26. For the Lord (Spotify) (YouTube) -- Rahul Matthan. 27. Predicting the Future -- Rahul Matthan (on Asimov's concept of Psychohistory etc). 28. Gurwinder Bhogal Examines Human Nature — Episode 331 of The Seen and the Unseen. 29. The Looking-Glass Self. 30. Panopticon. 31. Danish Husain and the Multiverse of Culture -- Episode 359 of The Seen and the Unseen. 32. A Scientist in the Kitchen — Episode 204 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Krish Ashok). 33. We Are All Amits From Africa — Episode 343 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Krish Ashok and Naren Shenoy). 34. Nothing is Indian! Everything is Indian! — Episode 12 of Everything is Everything. 35. The Right to Privacy -- Samuel D Warren and Louis D Brandeis. 36. John Locke on Britannica, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Wikipedia and Econlib. 37. Build for Tomorrow -- Jason Feifer. 38. Ex Machina -- Alex Garland. 39. Arrival -- Denis Villeneuve. 40. The Great Manure Crisis of 1894 -- Rahul Matthan. 41. Climate Change and Our Power Sector — Episode 278 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshay Jaitley and Ajay Shah). 42. The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect -- Judea Pearl. 43. The New World Upon Us — Amit Varma on Alpha Zero. 44. Brave New World -- Vasant Dhar's podcast, produced by Amit Varma. 45. Human and Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare -- Episode 4 of Brave New World (w Eric Topol). 46. The Colonial Constitution -- Arghya Sengupta. 47. Beyond Consent: A New Paradigm for Data Protection -- Rahul Matthan. 48. The Puttaswamy case. 49. Judicial Reforms in India -- Episode 62 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Alok Prasanna Kumar.) 50. Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility among India's Professional Elite --  Swethaa S Ballakrishnen. 51. Magic Fruit: A Poetic Trip -- Vaishnav Vyas. 52. Hermanos Gutiérrez and Arc De Soleil on Spotify. 53. The Travelling Salesman Problem. 54. The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet -- Jeff Kosseff. 55. Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace -- Lawrence Lessig. 56. Financial Inclusion and Digital Transformation in India -- Suyash Rai. 57. No Time for False Modesty -- Rahul Matthan. 58. In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy -- Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah. 59. Once Upon a Prime -- Sarah Hart. 60. The Greatest Invention -- Silvia Ferrara. 61. Surveillance State -- Josh Chin and Liza Lin. 62. Surveillance Valley -- Yasha Levine. 63. Sex Robots and Vegan Meat -- Jenny Kleeman. 64. How to Take Smart Notes -- Sönke Ahrens. 65. The Creative Act -- Rick Rubin. 66. How to Write One Song -- Jeff Tweedy. 67. Adrian Tchaikovsky and NK Jemisin on Amazon. 68. Snarky Puppy. on Spotify and YouTube. 69. Empire Central -- Snarky Puppy. 70. Polyphia on Spotify and YouTube. 71. The Lazarus Project on Jio Cinema. This episode is sponsored by the Pune Public Policy Festival 2024, which takes place on January 19 & 20, 2024. The theme this year is Trade-offs! Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new video podcast. Check out Everything is Everything on YouTube. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art: ‘Protocol' by Simahina.

In the past decade, we've seen an explosion in medical and biotechnologies like gene editing with CRISPR, synthetic organs, cloning, and AI-powered prosthetics that are helping to eradicate disease, improve the human condition, and enhance our brain power. These developments have radically transformed our understanding of the human body and what we thought was possible. But like most new tech, there's also potential for misuse, privacy concerns, and ethical implications. Gene editing can cure debilitating diseases but also lead to designer babies. AI learning algorithms can power neural implants but also potentially create new chemical weapons.    Ian Bremmer delves into that tension on the GZERO World Podcast with Siddhartha Mukherjee, a physician and biologist whose new book, “The Song of the Cell,” explores the science, history, and technology behind what he calls “the new humans.”  

In the past decade, we've seen an explosion in medical and biotechnologies like gene editing with CRISPR, synthetic organs, cloning, and AI-powered prosthetics that are helping to eradicate disease, improve the human condition, and enhance our brain power. These developments have radically transformed our understanding of the human body and what we thought was possible. But like most new tech, there's also potential for misuse, privacy concerns, and ethical implications. Gene editing can cure debilitating diseases but also lead to designer babies. AI learning algorithms can power neural implants but also potentially create new chemical weapons.    Ian Bremmer delves into that tension on the GZERO World Podcast with Siddhartha Mukherjee, a physician and biologist whose new book, “The Song of the Cell,” explores the science, history, and technology behind what he calls “the new humans.”   Subscribe to the GZERO World with Ian Bremmer Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.

Aldo takes you through the 12 books he read this year. Listen in and be inspired by this list of books, some of them recommended by previous guests on Messy and Masterful.  'A House for Mr. Biswas' by V.S. Naipaul: https://amzn.eu/d/davSL9e 'The Practice of Groundedness' by Brad Stuhlberg: https://amzn.eu/d/1ZLbTxx 'The Years' by Annie Ernaux: https://amzn.eu/d/gIS1yEC 'Demon Copperhead' by Barbara Kingsolver: https://amzn.eu/d/gU4zce7 ‘Siddhartha' by Herman Hesse: https://amzn.eu/d/5lIu8n3 'Man Search for Meaning' by Viktor E. Frankl: https://amzn.eu/d/8xxVVRM 'The Covenant of Water' by Abraham Verghese: https://amzn.eu/d/8147pNe ‘Afterlives' by Abdulrazak Gunrah: https://amzn.eu/d/eVSQTK3 'If You Want to Write' by Brenda Ueland: https://amzn.eu/d/fgaaGcT ‘Build The Life You Want' by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey: https://amzn.eu/d/b4596xt ‘The Big Leap' by Gay Hendricks: https://amzn.eu/d/17hnLHb ‘The Gene: An Intimate History' by Siddhartha Mukherjee: https://amzn.eu/d/57uBkhW

Will artificial intelligence change what it means to be human? Cancer physician, researcher, and author Siddhartha Mukherjee joins the podcast to help rethink how we understand human health—and the ways AI can help. Sid talks about using AI to emancipate patients from disease as well as enhance patient health and wellbeing. He also discusses the risks that come along with incorporating AI into the medical world and how new technologies in medicine are ushering in a “new human.” Plus, Sid and Reid pose a thought exercise: if there were five spots on a spaceship about to be sent off to restart humanity, which professions would get those seats? Read the transcript of this episode here. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all of the episodes, visit www.possible.fm/podcast.    Topics: 6:22 - Hellos and intros  8:50 - What excites Sid most about cancer research right now 13:08 - Bringing CAR T-cell therapy to India  15:48 - Reflections on AI and medicine  19:31 - Can we make something completely new in medicine with AI? 22:01 - Pi explains AlphaFold 23:35 - What risks are worth taking to accelerate science? 25:23 - The New Human  32:36 - Enhancement vs. Emancipation 39:43 - Sid's thoughts on the meaning of humanity writ large 47:04 - Which professions should be on the spaceship that's sent off to restart humanity?  54:18 - Rapidfire questions The award-winning Possible podcast is back with a new season that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Most of all, it asks: what if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? Tune in for grounded and speculative takes on how technology—and, in particular, AI—is inspiring change and transforming the future.  This season, hosts Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger, are speaking with a new set of ambitious builders and deep thinkers about everything from art to geopolitics and from healthcare to education. These conversations also showcase another kind of guest: AI. Whether it's Inflection's Pi, OpenAI's ChatGPT or other AI tools, each episode will use AI to enhance and advance our discussion.  Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network and hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard, Sara Schleede, and Paloma Moreno Jimenez. Jenny Kaplan is our Executive Producer and Editor. Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Ben Relles, Yan Ma, and Little Monster Media Company.

In conversation with Carl H. June, MD, Director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies, University of Pennsylvania Siddhartha Mukherjee won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction for The Emperor of All Maladies, a ''meticulously researched, panoramic history'' (The Boston Globe) of humankind's fight against cancer. It was awarded the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, was named to numerous media outlets' ''Best of the Year'' lists, and was adapted by Ken Burns into a PBS documentary. Mukherjee is also the author of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller The Gene: An Intimate History. An assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at the New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, he is a physician and researcher whose laboratory focuses on discovering new cancer drugs. His articles and commentary have been published in such places as Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times, and The New Republic. In The Song of the Cell, Mukherjee takes readers through the centuries-spanning quest to understand cells, the tiny self-contained units that make up all life. Carl June is the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the Perelman School of Medicine and director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania. Acclaimed for his research into the treatment of leukemia, he has published more than 350 medical papers and has received numerous awards and honors. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation to keep our podcasts free for everyone. THANK YOU! (recorded 10/5/2023)

Chapter 1 What's The Emperor of All Maladies"The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer" is a non-fiction book written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-American physician and researcher. Published in 2010, the book provides a comprehensive history of cancer, focusing on its origins, treatment methods, and the ongoing battle against the disease. It explores the scientific, social, and personal aspects of cancer, and delves into the stories of patients, researchers, and physicians who have shaped the fight against cancer throughout history. "The Emperor of All Maladies" won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2011 and has been widely acclaimed for its narrative style and depth of research.Chapter 2 Why is The Emperor of All Maladies Worth ReadThe Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee is worth reading for several reasons:1. Comprehensive and engaging storytelling: Mukherjee tells the history of cancer in a captivating and accessible manner. He weaves together personal stories of patients and their struggles with insightful scientific explanations, making the book suitable for both lay readers and those with a scientific background.2. In-depth exploration of a complex disease: Cancer is a multifaceted and elusive disease, and Mukherjee takes the time to explore its many aspects. He discusses its origins, the various treatments developed over the years, the social and political factors surrounding cancer research, and the implications for the future.3. Humanizes the disease: By sharing personal accounts of patients and their experiences, Mukherjee puts a face to the disease. This human perspective helps readers empathize with those affected by cancer and understand the devastating impact it has on their lives.4. Explores the triumphs and failures: The book covers both breakthroughs and setbacks in cancer research, highlighting the perseverance and determination of scientists throughout history. It gives readers a deeper appreciation for the complexities involved in fighting this disease.5. Raises important questions: The Emperor of All Maladies makes readers think about the ethical dilemmas faced by doctors and researchers in the field of cancer. It prompts discussions about the balance between scientific progress and patient welfare, the cost of treatment, and the role of societal attitudes toward cancer.Overall, The Emperor of All Maladies is a thought-provoking and informative book that offers a comprehensive overview of cancer, its history, and the ongoing efforts to understand and combat it.Chapter 3 The Emperor of All Maladies SummaryThe Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer is a non-fiction book by Siddhartha Mukherjee published in 2010. The book provides a comprehensive and engaging narrative of the history, biology, and treatment of cancer.Mukherjee begins the book by tracing the origins of cancer, exploring its appearances in ancient civilizations and his own personal encounters with patients as an oncologist. He delves into the roots of cancer research, discussing key breakthroughs such as the discovery of DNA and the first successful treatments of childhood leukemia.The author then navigates through the evolution of cancer treatment, from early surgeries and radiation therapy, to the development of chemotherapy drugs like Methotrexate and Tamoxifen. He also explores the rise of cancer organizations such as the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute, highlighting their impact on research and public awareness.Mukherjee also sheds light on the various challenges and controversies surrounding cancer research and treatment. He discusses the ethical dilemmas faced by...

This podcast is a commentary and does not contain any copyrighted material of the reference source. We strongly recommend accessing/buying the reference source at the same time. ■Reference Source https://www.ted.com/talks/siddhartha_mukherjee_soon_we_ll_cure_diseases_with_a_cell_not_a_pill ■Post on this topic (You can get FREE learning materials!) https://englist.me/180-academic-words-reference-from-siddhartha-mukherjee-soon-well-cure-diseases-with-a-cell-not-a-pill-ted-talk/ ■Youtube Video https://youtu.be/0tpfaymTGcg (All Words) https://youtu.be/W_gdYgv3DcQ (Advanced Words) https://youtu.be/gvKgwQgCE14 (Quick Look) ■Top Page for Further Materials https://englist.me/ ■SNS (Please follow!)

Halle grew up in Minneapolis, MN and went to undergrad at St. Olaf College, a small liberal arts school about an hour south of the Twin Cities. She went to Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, WI and ultimately matched out in Philadelphia at TJUH for my urology residency. She graduated summa cum laude from St. Olaf and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. In medical school she was in AOA. She studied abroad twice in undergrad and recently went on a pediatric urology medical mission trip to Amman, Jordan.___0:00 - Intro0:42 - Statistics About Urology3:23 - Residency Trip to Amman, Jordan7:58 - Why Urology?15:10 - What Was Urology Residency Like?21:53 - If I Give You $100 Million, What Would You Do?23:28 - Best Things About Urology26:29 - Worst Things About Urology28:56 - Good and Bad Consults30:30 - Things You Wish You Knew Before Coming Into Urology31:19 - Common Myths About Urology31:57 - Memorable Patient Encounters34:36 - Advice for Students Looking Into Urology37:28 - Maximizing Competitiveness Going Into Urology40:32 - Were You Ever Burned Out?42:53 - Advice to People to Have a Successful/Long-Term Career46:11 - What Advice Would You Give Your 18-Year-Old Self?46:53 - Common Mistakes Made by Attendings48:38 - Positive Qualities & Characteristics Seen in Attendings49:40 - Favorite Book Recommendation51:23 - Closing Message53:59 - Outro___ResourcesThe Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee - https://amzn.eu/d/5llEmiM___View the Show Notes Page for This Episode for transcript and more information: zhighley.com/podcast___Connect With ZachMain YouTube: @ZachHighley Newsletter: https://zhighley.com/newsletter/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zachhighley/?hl=enWebsite: https://zhighley.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/zachhighleyLinkedln: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zach-highley-gergel-44763766/Business Inquiries: zachhighley@nebula.tv___Listen for FreeSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/23TvJdEBAJuW5WY1QHEc6A?si=cf65ae0abbaf46a4Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-zach-highley-show/id1666374777___Welcome to the Zach Highley Show, where we discuss personal growth and medicine to figure out how to improve our lives. My name is Zach and I'm a medical student, and soon to be physician, in Philadelphia. Throughout these episodes I'll interview top performers from around the world in business, life, and medicine in hopes of extracting the resources and techniques they use to get to the top.The best way to help the show is share episodes on any platform. If you think a friend or family member will like a certain episode, send it to them!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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You defied some of the laws of physics to make that happen!Get the dog out for a walk, hop on the train or car to work or to school, put your gym gear on and tune in to find out who's the next guest in the Republic of Insead podcast. A few of my favorite snippets are below.20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:A number of crazy things happened related to the business and the growth of the business. We happened to find ourselves in an amazing position, through rapid succession, finished a fundraise, then within twelve months we managed to do an IPO which was the second largest IPO I think for biotech on the Nasdaq ever, I think next to Moderna.GE was really my training ground where I learned a lot. I had this kind of crash course in corporate finance and financials and tax and dealing with businesses and doing diligence integration contracts that was a real learning and training for me in my career and probably where I laid a lot of the foundations because many of those skills you just need as an executive but you need in the scrappy start-up / scale-up environment as well, making sure you're doing the right contracts for the long term and having a bit of confidence and swagger, if you will, of how to have a vision for the company that you have.ON TOPIC: Biotech, pandemic, IPO, drug discoveryAntibodies are Mother Nature's solution for fighting off disease and infection much more broadly than just around infectious disease. They are extremely safe because they're not chemicals. They're a part of biology that people have within them in their immune response and they are effective at treating anything from pain to metabolism, to neurodegenerative disease, cancer and oncology, diabetes.The thesis of AbCellera was that lots changed since 1970s in terms of our understanding of biology – sequencing, computation, PCR, but in order to get to the next level we need to be on a different technology curve that is going to make it possible to discover these medicines. What we decided to do is, using modern technologies, rebuild the entire front-end of drug discovery with how it relates to antibodies.When the actual pandemic hit with SARS Covid-2, we were sent the first blood sample that was on north American soil in order to put our technology in our engine to work and in what was world record speed, we went from receiving a sample to dosing a patient with an antibody drug in ninety days. Which is a process that normally takes four or five years.Our thesis here was, we've made these investments in technology to make the previously impossible possible and here was our moment where we validated it.Arguably the most competitive drug development project in the history of the world - we came first - this small company out in Vancouver… In the end, our products went into about two and a half million people, saving an estimated hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations. You can spend your entire career in Biotech and not have that kind of patient impact.WHY GIVE BACKINSEAD was a foundational moment and year for all of us in our lives. The luckiest thing is like I'm having the time of my life and my career and my family as well. References, mentions: GE Healthcare Life Sciences, STEMCELL, lipid nanoparticle technology, Danaher, Precision NanoSystems, AbCellera, Biotech, tech-enabled biotech, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), Lifespan by David Sinclair, The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee, Ideation, IPO, NASDAQ, Series-B, Baker Brothers, OrbiMed, Thiel Capital, Founders Fund, COVID, UBC (University of British Columbia), Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich, Steve Job Think Different campaign

Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Gene: An Intimate History, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, and The Laws of Medicine. Told in six parts and laced with his own experience as a researcher, doctor, and a prolific reader, Mukherjee's new book The Song of the Cell, tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans. Mukherjee is an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher.  On November 10, 2022, Mukherjee came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with Indre Viskontas, a cognitive neuroscientist who co-hosts the popular science podcast Inquiring Minds. This is an encore broadcast.

As eng leaders, we're often strapped for resources – so learning how to advocate for more support is vital. Megan Kacholia, VP of Engineering @ Google, reveals her best strategies when it comes to asking for more resources, removing linchpins / critical points of failure from your eng team, encouraging others to accept changes that will benefit them, knowing when to say “yes” vs. “no” to new responsibilities (and the trade-offs that come with that decision), and navigating challenging situations as a manager.ABOUT MEGAN KACHOLIAMegan Kacholia is a Vice President of Engineering within Google's Core organization.  She is a leader in the Cross-Google Engineering (xGE) effort, which is responsible for company-wide technical coordination. Her passion is building effective teams and addressing barriers to help Googlers do their best work.Previously, Megan was and VP in Google's Research organization, where her team's work spanned machine learning in research as well as production, including products such as TensorFlow, and prior to that she had a long tenure in Google's Ads organization, where she ran the serving system for Google's DisplayAds business.  Megan has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from UIUC."At the end of the day, we had to be able to explain it to the team. Right? And I can't go and tell the team and be like, 'Well, the opex costs are too high because you know of this reason with the headcount and this and that and I know so and so told you they love you, but really it didn't mean this thing.'In some ways, those details don't matter, right? What matters is these people are worried that their project's getting shut down. So when it came time to communicate that we actually were gonna shut it down. We have to do an official shutdown because we have to announce it externally. So that means we have to make sure people only have so many weeks to find a new project and all of these things. So the main thing I emphasize when I talked to them wasn't about like, 'Oh, I did all of this work to try and save your project, and I couldn't.' That was irrelevant. It couldn't be saved.The most important thing was about what's the impact for the people? Well, I've already lined up options and positions for every single one.”- Megan Kacholia  Check out our friends and sponsor, JellyfishTo learn more about Jellyfish and how they can help you increase engineering satisfaction and create happier, higher-performing engineering teams.Learn more at Jellyfish.co/elcJoin us for one of our in-person community events!That's right! We're hosting in-person community events in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, and Chicago! Break out of your comfort zone and join us in a casual environment to connect, problem-solve, and support each other in our engineering leadership journeys.Don't see your city on the list? No problem!Reach out to Tim at Tim@sfelc.com and let's bring ELC to you - and make it happen!TO GET INVOLVED, EMAIL OUR HEAD OF COMMUNITY TIM AT TIM@SFELC.COMSHOW NOTES:How Megan advocated for more resources / support at Google (3:07)Convincing direct reports to accept changes & understand benefits (6:07)Insights on how to drive change within your eng team (10:20)Balancing accuracy & simplicity when communicating with your team (12:29)Frameworks for saying “yes” vs. “no” to new responsibilities (16:41)What to do when the decision to say “yes” or “no” isn't clear (19:46)Having the confidence to say “no” (20:53)Find ways to give your team control within the given situation (24:38)The hardest situations to say “no” to as an eng leader (25:54)Megan's approach to managing people with more experience than you (28:57)How to navigate managing someone you have a pre-existing peer relationship with (31:09)Knowing when to help vs. fix as a manager (35:14)Tips for removing “linchpins” / critical points of failure from your eng team (37:34)Rapid fire questions (41:12)LINKS AND RESOURCESThe Emperor of All Maladies - Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist's precision, a historian's perspective, and a biographer's passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years.This episode wouldn't have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-HostJerry Li - Co-HostNoah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan's also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

View the Show Notes Page for This Episode Become a Member to Receive Exclusive Content Sign Up to Receive Peter's Weekly Newsletter Siddhartha Mukherjee is an oncologist, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and previous guest on The Drive. In this episode, Sid discusses many of the subjects of his latest book, The Song of the Cell, including the incredible discovery of the cell and how it transformed medicine. He explains the evolutionary drive to go from single-cell to multicellular life and unpacks the four different types of cell-based therapies and the problems they are attempting to solve. He also provides the latest in gene therapy, such as CRISPR, and the ethical questions around human gene editing. Additionally, he touches on a number of fascinating topics, such as the challenges of medical science, the human brain, learning styles, his writing process, mental health, and more. We discuss: How the cell brings the genome to life, and how Sid's recent book fits into his prior work to tell a story [2:30]; How the germ theory of disease and an understanding of the cell fueled a big leap in medicine [9:45]; What is the evolutionary drive for multicellular life? [17:15]; Four types of cell therapies and the challenges of gene therapy [26:00]; CAR T-cell therapy: promising gene therapy for cancer [36:30]; The possibility of using gene therapy to treat germline mutations like sickle cell disease [41:45]; The incredible revolution of gene editing with CRISPR [45:15]; Ethical questions around human gene editing [52:30]; The complex role of genetics in mental illness [1:01:30]; Two types of problems in science: the “eye in the sandstorm” problem and the “sand in the eye” problem [1:06:15]; Understanding neural networks: an example of the “sand in the eye” problem being solved [1:08:45]; Importance of learning by doing: comparing the learning styles of a doctoral student to a medical student [1:16:30]; Sid's unique and brilliant style of writing [1:20:45]; Falling as the leading cause of accidental death: a liability of multicellular existence [1:25:00]; Sid's struggle with depression and his desire to change the stigma around mental illness [1:29:15]; and More. Connect With Peter on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube

Siddhartha Mukherjee is an oncologist, professor, researcher, and biotech entrepreneur. He's also a writer, and a fine one at that. His first book, “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,” won a Pulitzer Prize. His second, “The Gene: An Intimate History,” shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and was made into a documentary by Ken Burns. In his latest book, “The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human,” he says our radical new ability to manipulate cells is changing how we treat everything from Alzheimer's to cancer. --- We launched a new podcast! It's called The Next Big Idea Daily. Follow it now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

Remember when Juul was a verb? The generecized word for vape? I REMEMBER! That business really came and went like a beautiful comet. Joining me to talk about the historic rise and fall of Juul is my dear friend Emma Day! The legal machinations behind regulating cigarettes is FASCINATING, and the status of cigarettes in the law affects the ways we make e-cigs. Also, we just talk about the smoking cessation industry in general, which is a hilarious thing we invented to solve the problem of overproducing unbelievably addictive yet dangerous objects. Emma is so fucking funny, please listen to her podcast Do You Have a Sec? everywhere! SOURCES: Books: The Cigarette: A Political History, Sarah Milov, 2019 The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee, 2010 Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, Robert Proctor, 2011 Web: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/MassvsJuul.pdf https://www.fda.gov/news-events/fda-voices/how-fda-regulating-e-cigarettes https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02991-w https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-vaping-juul/juul-use-more-than-doubled-among-u-s-teens-young-adults-in-one-year-idUSKBN1ZK2SV https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-09/juul-to-pay-1-2-billion-in-youth-vaping-settlement https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/nicotine-replacement-therapy-market https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/juul-appeals-block-fda-ban-e-cigarettes-2022-06-24/ PS, I'm nominated for a Chicago Reader Award! Vote for me at this link (under "city life" for "best podcast") https://chicagoreader.com/best-of-chicago/2022-ballot-voting-nominations/#/gallery/357091644/

Usually when you hear about meat's connection to methane, it's about all the methane that cows are emitting into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change. What if, however, you could capture methane before it goes into the atmosphere, and feed it to microbes which in turn convert it into protein-packed ingredients to make alt-meat? Sounds like magic, but it's not magic, it's science! And it's a science that Dr. Ezhil Subbian and her team at String Bio are advancing right now. The India-based company in 2022 closed its $20 million Series B round and is now scaling up to commercialize its microbial protein ingredients. In this interview, Dr. Subbian and I talk about how she started the company, why she moved it from Silicon Valley to Bangalore, India, where they get the methane to feed their microbes, and much more. It's a fun conversation with someone passionate about fermentation and seeking to scale it in a part of the world where it's desperately needed—where meat demand is rising the fastest: Asia. So enjoy this conversation with a real pioneer in the microbial fermentation space as she tells you her story of going from biotech researcher to startup CEO. Discussed in this episode Our past episode with Zero Acre Farms. Ezhil recommends Meditations by Marcus Aurelius  Paul's favorite quote from Meditations: “Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it's endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it's unendurable … then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well.” Ezhil recommends The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee  Finally, Ezhil recommends Good to Great by Jim Collins More about Ezhil Subbian, PhD Ezhil is a scientist, innovator, thinker, hiking enthusiast and a citizen of the world. Ezhil is driven by a passion to leverage the power of biology to deliver sustainable and cost-effective solutions. Her experience in biobased product development over the last 20 years helps her bring deep technical expertise to the work at String. Ezhil's work was most recently recognized with the Women Transforming India Award 2018 from United Nations/NITI Aayog. Ezhil completed her degree in Industrial and Biotech engineering from Anna University, Chennai, and then went on to do a PhD in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. She then worked for over 12 years in Silicon Valley's Bay area as part of the biotechnology industry. She worked as a scientist and technical lead across multiple companies before becoming a consultant and then starting up. Ezhil is a scientist, innovator, thinker, hiking enthusiast and a citizen of the world. Ezhil is driven by a passion to leverage the power of biology to deliver sustainable and cost-effective solutions. Her experience in biobased product development over the last 20 years helps her bring deep technical expertise to the work at String. Ezhil's work was most recently recognized with the Women Transforming India Award 2018 from United Nations/NITI Aayog.

Happy New Year! Enjoy these interviews with some of our favorite authors from 2022: Imani Perry, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, shares the insights she gleaned about U.S. history and culture from her travels in the South from South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (Ecco, 2022), winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction. Siddhartha Mukherjee, physician and author of several books including The Emperor of All Maladies, The Gene, and his latest, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human (Scribner, 2022), talks about his new book that explores the new world of cellular medicine. Peniel Joseph, Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century (Basic Books, 2022), talks about his new book that argues that since 2008, America has been experiencing a new Reconstruction, equal to the period following the Civil War and to the mid-20th century civil rights movement. Lydia Millet, climate novelist and author of several books, including Dinosaurs: A Novel (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), joins to talk about her new book and how to find hope amid existential dread brought on by climate change. Andy Borowitz, author, comedian, and creator of The New Yorker's “Borowitz Report,” a satirical news column, and the author of Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2022), talks about his new book that skewers politicians of the past 50 years plus shares humorous insights into some current politics.   These interviews were lightly edited for timing and rebroadcast; the original web versions are available here: Imani Perry's Journey Across the American South (Feb 4, 2022) Siddhartha Mukherjee on Medicine at the Cellular Level (Oct 28, 2022) Today's Reconstruction (Sep 6, 2022) A Climate Novelist on Hope and Dread (Oct 11, 2022) Andy Borowitz's 'Profiles in Ignorance' (Oct 26, 2022)  

In this thought-provoking interview series from the RSA, Matthew Taylor, puts a range of leading thinkers on the spot - from writers to business leaders, politicians to journalists - by asking for big ideas to help build effective bridges to our new future. Pulitzer Prize-winning physician, biologist, and author, Siddhartha Mukherjee, joins Matthew to discuss the importance of the body's smallest structural and functional unit: the cell. He explains why the cell is so important when it comes to understanding the human body, medical science - and the story of life itself. Siddhartha Mukherjee is an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. He is the author of numerous bestselling books, including 'The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer', winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction and 'The Laws of Medicine' and , The Gene: An Intimate History. His latest book is, The Song of the Cell. A Tempo & Talker production for the RSA. In this time of global change, strong communities and initiatives that bring people together are more invaluable than ever before. The RSA Fellowship is a global network of problem solvers. We invite you to join our community today to stay connected, inspired and motivated in the months ahead. You can learn more about the Fellowship or start an application by clicking here.

In a special episode recorded in front of a live audience at the Stanford School of Medicine, Dean Lloyd Minor welcomes award-winning author and physician-scientist Siddhartha Mukherjee. They discuss Siddhartha's new book, The Song of the Cell, how history and philosophy inform our understanding of biomedical progress, and the importance of conveying authority, while also acknowledging uncertainty, in science communication. Siddhartha also talks about his writing process, how he balances his work as a writer, physician, scientist, and entrepreneur, and biomedical breakthroughs that give him hope for the future.

Physician Siddhartha Mukherjee explains how cellular science could lead to breakthroughs in the treatment of cancer, HIV, Type 1 diabetes and sickle cell anemia. His new book is The Song of the Cell.

Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Gene: An Intimate History, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, and The Laws of Medicine. Told in six parts and laced with his own experience as a researcher, doctor, and a prolific reader, Mukherjee's new book The Song of the Cell, tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans. Mukherjee is an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher.  On November 10, 2022, Mukherjee came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an onstage conversation with Indre Viskontas, a cognitive neuroscientist who co-hosts the popular science podcast Inquiring Minds. 

Ukrainians are celebrating a monumental victory after its forces liberated the key southern city of Kherson – the only regional capital Russia managed to seize since February. It's a stinging defeat for Moscow, where Putin is facing increasingly fierce criticism for his invasion of Ukraine – including from some of his own citizens, at major personal risk. This is the focus of a new Frontline documentary, Putin's War at Home. Its producer Vasily Kolotilov joins the show, alongside Natalia, a journalist featured in the film.  Also on today's show: historian and author Timothy Snyder; author Siddhartha Mukherjee.To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy

The Pulitzer-winning oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee recalls the thrill of seeing for the first time the extraordinary ‘luminosity' of a living cell. In his latest work, The Song of the Cell, he explores the history, the present and the future of cellular biology. He tells Adam Rutherford that without understanding cells you can't understand the human body, medicine, and especially the story of life itself. ‘Once upon a time I fell in love with a cell.' So recalls the leading cardiologist Sian Harding, when she looked closely at a single heart muscle cell, and she found a ‘deeper beauty' revealing the ‘perfection of the heart's construction'. In her book, The Exquisite Machine, she describes how new scientific developments are opening up the mysteries of the heart, and why a ‘broken heart' might be more than a literary flight of fancy. The prize-winning science fiction writer Paul McAuley was once a research scientist studying symbiosis, especially single-celled algae inside host cells. He has since used his understanding of science to write books that ask questions about life on earth and outer-space, and about the implications of the latest cutting edge research, from nanotechnology to gene editing. His 2001 novel The Secret of Life, which features the escape of a protean Martian microorganism from a Chinese laboratory, has just been reissued. Producer: Katy Hickman

Cells are the basic unit of life, but you could be forgiven if you stopped thinking about them after high school biology. In his newest book, “The Song of the Cell,” physician and author Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee explores the myriad ways the humble cell is key to our world and our biology. He speaks to WSJ's Alex Ossola about how our understanding of the cell is opening up a new frontier in medicine, how it is helping create new treatments for difficult diseases like cancer, and how it could one day help fix or even enhance our bodies.  What's something you're curious about that could shape the future? Email us at foepodcast@wsj.com    Further reading:  Book Review: The Emperor of All Maladies  Peeking Into Pandora's Box  Publisher Tweaks ‘Gene' Book After New Yorker Article Uproar  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Siddhartha Mukherjee, physician and author of several books including The Emperor of All Maladies, The Gene, and his latest, The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human (Scribner, 2022), talks about his new book that explores the new world of cellular medicine.

In the 1600s, scientists made a tiny discovery with huge implications: the cell. Pulitzer Prize-winner Siddhartha Mukherjee joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the radical concept of the cell, its long history in science and medicine, and how it continues to produce new and exciting therapies today. His book is “The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human.”

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Siddhartha Mukherjee about cellular biology. They define what a cell is and talk about the importance of Leeuwenhoek and Hooke in observing and discovering the cell. They talk about the five basic principles of cell biology and explore the anatomy of a cell. They explain how important B cells and T cells are for the innate immune system and the adaptive immune system for fighting diseases such as SARS-CoV-2 and HIV. They also talk about the potential of stem cells for human medicine and many other topics.  Siddhartha Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer researcher and physician. He has his Bachelors in biology from Stanford University. As a Rhodes Scholar, he has a DPhil in immunology from Oxford University and an MD from Harvard University. He has published articles in journals such as Nature and The New England Journal of Medicine and in mainstream outlets such as The New York Times. He is the author of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize winning, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, The New York Times best-Seller, The Gene: An Intimate History, and the author of the new book, The Song of The Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and The New Human. You can find his work here. Twitter: @drsidmukherjee

For the next few months, we're sharing some of our favorite conversations from the podcast's archives. This week's segments first appeared in 2016 and 2018, respectively.Since winning the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for his first book, “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,” in 2011, the physician and professor Siddhartha Mukherjee has gone on to write two more sweeping studies of medical and scientific subjects: “The Song of the Cell,” which will be released next week, and “The Gene: An Intimate History,” which came out in 2016. Mukherjee was a guest on the podcast when “The Gene” was published, and he told the host Pamela Paul that his earlier book about cancer had led him naturally to the topic of genetics and heredity. “The more I thought about disease, illness, the more I came back to the question of inheritance: What do we inherit, what do our families give to us? How much of it is genetic, how much of it is environmental?” he said.Also this week, we revisit Kate Atkinson's podcast appearance from 2018, when she discussed her World War II spy novel “Transcription” and its heroine, who starts out as “a very clever girl who's slightly out of order.” Atkinson's latest novel, “Shrines of Gaiety,” was published last month.We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review's podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.

Siddhartha Mukherjee is an author, biologist, and physician. Siddhartha joins the Armchair Expert to discuss how the evolution of cells can advance medical technology, how some body parts can reject cancer cells, and how the view of the opioid epidemic has changed. Siddhartha and Dax talk about where the idea of reclaiming one's identity came from, what it means to be an insider or outsider of a certain group, and the differences between RNA and DNA. Siddhartha explains the different ways to organize a book, why he doesn't own a television, and how cells communicate with each other in the human body. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Elle discusses the bad faith question from her perspective, including observations about TERF ideology, the erroneous conflation of sex and gender, and the existence of exceptions to the rigid rules extreme conservatives would like to enforce. She talks about Siddhartha Mukherjee's book "The Gene", Kate Borenstein's "Gender Outlaw", and Julia Serrano's amazing work on biology and gender. What do you think? What should she cover next? Send Elle an email at twatpodcasting@gmail.com.

As a species, we're obsessed with names. They're one of the first labels we get as kids. We name and rename absolutely everything around us. And these names carry our histories, they can open and close our eyes to the world around us, and they drag the weight of expectation and even irony along with them. This week on Radiolab, we've got six stories all about names. Horse names, the names of diseases, names for the beginning, and names for the end. Listen to “Hello, My Name Is” on Radiolab, wherever you find podcasts.  Special thanks to Jim Wright, author of “The Real James Bond” (Bond segment), Tad Davis (reporting help for The Other Robert E. Lee), Cole delCharco (“del-CHAR-ko”) (tape syncer for Horse Names), Peter Frick-Wright, Alexa Rose Miller, Katherine De La Cruz, and Fahima Haque.Members of The Lab, watch for an audio extra on your exclusive feeds, a poem written and read by Mary Szybist, whom Molly Webster interviewed for her story in this episode about endlings. It is titled “We Think We Do Not Have Medieval Eyes.” If you are not yet a member and would like to listen to it, you can join here. Radiolab is on YouTube! Catch up with new episodes and hear classics from our archive. Plus, find other cool things we did in the past — like miniseries, music videos, short films and animations, behind-the-scenes features, Radiolab live shows, and more. Take a look, explore and subscribe!Citations: The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee Warhorse: Cavalry in Ancient Warfare by Philip SidnellCheck out ArtsPractica.com, a site focused on medical uncertainty. Alexa Rose Miller.