#32 - Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D., Ph.D.: new frontiers in cancer therapy, medicine, and the writing process

In this episode, Siddhartha Mukherjee, oncologist, researcher, and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,” discusses his writing process, his thoughts about medicine, cancer, immunotherapy, and his recent collaboration on a study combining a ketogenic diet with a drug in mice that provided remarkable and encouraging results.

We discuss:

• Sid’s background [5:00];
• How Sid and Peter met [6:00];
• Sid’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book: The Emperor of All Maladies [8:00];
• Sid’s writing process: the tenets of writing [12:30];
• Our struggle to find preventable, human, chemical carcinogens of substantial impact [23:30];
• The three laws of medicine — Law #1: A strong intuition is much more powerful than a weak test [26:30];
• Law #2 of medicine: “Normals” teach us rules; “outliers” teach us laws [32:00];
• Law #3 of medicine: For every perfect medical experiment, there is a perfect human bias [35:00];
• The excitement around immunotherapy [38:15];
• The story of Gleevec [46:00];
• How does the body's metabolic state affect cancer? [49:30];
• Can a nutritional state be exploited and/or a drug sensitivity be exploited through a nutritional intervention? [52:00];
• How does Sid balance his family, writing, research, laboratory, and patients? [1:00:30]; and
• More.

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