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

The Peter Attia Drive

Peter Attia, MD

Health & Fitness, Medicine, Fitness

4.7 • 7.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 December 2018

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Atia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Atia.
0:10.0	The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking,
0:15.7	along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working
0:19.6	with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world, and this podcast
0:23.8	is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality
0:28.3	and more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's
0:32.4	episode and other topics at PeterAtiaMD.com.
0:35.3	Hey everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. I guess this week is Sid Mukherjee,
0:48.3	who is a remarkable writer, in fact a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, and a remarkable physician
0:55.0	and scientist. In fact, probably there's nobody I know that combines those three things as
1:00.2	efficaciously as Sid does. His biography reads like I'm making it up. He studied biology at Stanford.
1:07.1	He then became a Rhodes scholar, went to Oxford, earned his PhD in immunology, returned to the
1:12.2	United States to earn his MD at Harvard, etc., etc., etc. Fast forward to today. He is an associate
1:18.6	professor of medicine in the Division of hematology and oncology at Columbia University, which
1:23.2	is where we met to do this interview. He has published also and continues to publish consistently
1:28.6	in both the New Yorker and the New York Times, which in and of itself is quite a distinction, as I
1:32.9	would learn, typically one is on either side of those, but not both. And of course, he's published
1:38.0	in the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, in addition to a whole host of other medical journals.
1:43.0	I met Sid probably five years ago at a dinner that was set up by Lou Cantley, someone I'll be
1:47.9	interviewing very shortly, who will be a guest, obviously soon. And while I remember that dinner
1:53.1	very well, I was surprised to learn that it left such an impression on Sid. And he described it as
1:57.6	something to the effect of one of the most interesting and perhaps important scientific collaborations in
	...

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