Hello everyone and welcome to the Minescape Podcast.

I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

And today we're talking about a somewhat difficult subject, which is cancer, and how

we can try to treat and prevent cancer from taking lives.

It's a difficult subject, of course, because I, and I'm sure many other people in the audience,

are familiar with people who have passed away because of cancer.

The two leading causes of any kind of death in the United States are heart disease and

cancer by a wide margin, these two things.

And I think at least, you know, informally, I don't have any data, and I want to valorize

one way of dying over another.

But my informal impression is that cancer is much cooler than heart disease in many ways.

It can come on people who are otherwise perfectly healthy.

It can appear in people relatively young.

I know people in their 40s and 50s who have been diagnosed.

And the way that we have of treating it is not very good.

It involves a very painful process, a very drawn out, long process that often fails, that

often, even though we do everything we can, cancer still claims a victim.

So today's guest on Mindscape is Azra Raza, who is the Chan Sun-Shyong Professor of Medicine

at Columbia University.

She's an oncologist.

She's been doing cancer research for a long time.

She has a new book out called The First Cell, the human costs of pursuing cancer to the

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