I'm here in plenary session, real-life edition, and I'm sitting on the couch of Dr. Eric Collison.

Professor Collison is a professor of medicine here at the University of California, San Francisco.

He's a medical oncologist. He's a GI cancer expert, and he is also a physician scientist runs a lab.

And it's a pleasure to get to talk to you. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Well, thanks for inviting me and coming over to do this.

I've heard a lot of good things about you. I hear from the fellows that you're a great

raconteur, and I also listened to your recent talk in the Friday morning sessions, and I thought

it was terrific. Maybe I'll ask you about that in a little bit. But I guess first I wanted to ask

you a question just about, you know, if you could maybe explain to the listeners a little bit about how you wear the two hats of physician scientists, how you divide your time between clinic and lab and what your lab focuses on.

Yeah, happy to.

I've been at UCSF since fellowship, so now over 15, coming on 20 years.

It's a little closer.

And the, I've always been fascinated by science.

I like to say, took the expensive, full cost route to being a physician scientist in that I didn't actually

get an MD PhD in medical school. I went to UCLA and paid full freight rather than having it

paid for by our government and recently completed paying off my loans, by the way.

Wow, just in time for the forgiveness.

Just in time, just in time.

No water under that bridge.

But anyway, so took a year off in medical school and got to go to the NIH with the Hughes program,

which was really transformational and did a year after medical school

of more research I had started and just kind of never considered not being in the lab

...