My guest today, Monica Burton Yoli is a surgeon by training and the former head of the National Cancer Institute.

Currently, she heads the National Institutes of Health, the NIH, as it's called, is the biggest

funder of basic medical research in the world.

There are so many marketed today, but we really do have a log jam when it comes to the ability to conduct clinical

research, particularly randomized clinical trials. Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Leavitt.

It's a long way from the operating room to the boardroom managing a 50 billion dollar budget

and I'm curious to hear about both those sides of my guest today.

My challenge will be that people who hold political positions

they often feel constrained about what they can say.

And I'm hoping we can at least talk about some important topics like

how the NIH funds research, big pharma,

and how she deals with the current politicized atmosphere.

You grew up on a cattle ranch in Wyoming and I've looked at the map. It must be one of the most

isolated places in the United States.

It was to me the best place in the world to grow up. It's at 9,000 feet in

elevation in the Wind River Mountains. From the house it was 18 miles of dirt

road just to get to a highway and 98 miles from the nearest town and

when we got to be school age my mother would move down to the town of Rock Springs in southwestern Wyoming and that's where we went to school.

The few kids I've known who grew up on a family farm have described their youth as harder work than they've ever done at any other point in their life.

Was that your existence or were you allowed to be a kid?

Well, a little of both.

The thing about growing up in an agricultural family is that your mother and father's

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