Dr. Peter Attia
speaker
5,258 appearances
36 recordings
6 series
first heard Jan 2024
last heard Jun 2025
Dr. Peter Attia’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Sue talks about her leadership roles at UCSF and at the Gates Foundation, driving innovation in healthcare and global health, and the lessons learned from leading health research institutions and global health initiatives, balancing financial constraints with scientific progress and building culture.
We end this discussion with a perspective on the future of medicine, including AI's role in healthcare, such as the opportunities and challenges in leveraging AI for drug development, diagnostics, and expanding access to high quality care. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellman. Sue, thank you so much for making the trip out to Austin.
Really, really was excited to meet you last year. Just an honor to spend part of a day with you and then realize that I could somehow twist your arm into coming on the podcast.
You've had just an unbelievable career. You are an absolute giant in many ways. I love to always give people a sense of how someone got to where they got. So if I recall, you grew up in Reno, is that right?
And you went to high school and college and even medical school all the way through, right?
then that you ended up at UCSF for your residency?
Okay. So remind me where we were in the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco in 82. What was known?
as a result of treating patients. And what were they presenting with at the time? It's hard for anyone of even my generation. You've never seen a drug naive patient. All of my experience with HIV, which was a lot in Baltimore many years later, but everyone was on something. So how would these men present to you as a medicine resident?
Tell folks why that's so unusual.
Tell folks what that is.
And was there ever a sense of fear among the medical staff that we don't know what this is, we don't know how it's transmitted, and therefore we don't know how to protect each other or ourselves or other patients for that matter? Like, it's hard for me to imagine that given how much we take for granted today.
Got it. For all intents and purposes, you were acting like this was Ebola without knowing. Absolutely.
And so you finished your residency in internal medicine. Did you go directly into your fellowship?
And why did you pick oncology?
I can really relate to that. When I was in my third year of medical school, I went to the NCI for three months with Steve Rosenberg. And it was the exact same experience. And I remember learning many lessons from Steve. One of them was that cancer diagnosis, and of course, at the NCI, as you know, nobody's showing up with stage one, two, or three cancer.
By definition, every patient there is showing up with metastatic cancer, and they've progressed through all standard treatments. So these are people that have six months to live. And maybe 10% of them you actually come up with a durable remission for. But he said, look, cancer will do one of two things to a family. It will take a strong family and bring them much closer together.
It will take a fractured family and blow them wide apart. As a doctor, as a nurse, as in anybody in the field of oncology, your ability to kind of be there for that family is as important, potentially more important than it is in any other specialty of medicine.
So tell me a little bit about the state of oncology in the mid 80s when you're embarking on your medical oncology fellowship. Help people understand what the world of cancer looked like roughly 40 years ago.
What was the nature of the program? It was a three-year fellowship with a research track on the side, because obviously UCSF is such an academic place.
You brought up the example of hep B and hepatocellular carcinoma. Was it understood at the time what we now know?
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