Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

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Today's podcast, I think, is a really important conversation. It is a conversation about cancer.

And before you decide that you don't feel like listening to a conversation about cancer,

please reflect on the fact that you or someone close to you will almost certainly get it.

This is just a virtual guarantee. My father died of cancer. I've had friends die of cancer.

Someone in my own family has cancer now. This is just all around you, whoever you are.

And today's guest is one of the great authorities on the topic. You've heard him before on the podcast.

But today I'll be speaking with Sardartha Mukherjee about the topic with which he is most closely

associated. Sardartha is a cancer physician and researcher. He is an assistant professor of

medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at Columbia NYU Presbyterian Hospital.

He's a former Rhodes scholar. He graduated from Stanford and Oxford, where he received a PhD,

studying cancer-causing viruses, and from Harvard Medical School.

And his laboratory focuses on discovering new cancer drugs using various biological methods.

He's published everywhere you would expect, but he's also a regular writer for the New Yorker.

And he has won the Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Emperor of All Maladies, a biography of cancer.

And our conversation ranges widely from his experience as an oncologist.

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