John Burn-Murdoch

It's also worth, I think, taking a second to say that, you know, we always talk about radical change on this show, but there were also several things that Sir John said at certain points, which you might have felt were quite radical.

He touched on China, he touched on AI, he touched on the NHS, and all of those might not necessarily have sat well with yourselves.

On China, a lot of people have concerns about its human rights record and whether we should work with a

a country where those sort of things are happening.

On AI, there's the question, the related question of Palantir and its role in the NHS.

This is obviously a topic and a story that has been covered in huge detail in the UK recently.

There are a lot of people with a lot of concerns about

what the downstream consequences of working with a firm like this might be.

And on the NHS itself, obviously a lot of you will have strong, positive feelings about the National Health Service, and therefore some of Sir John's suggestions and comments about how the NHS is currently run and can be done differently might not have sat comfortably with you.

But probably, well, surely the most striking thing from that conversation was that we had here...

One of the preeminent figures in this field who has been doing this stuff for decades and who says that in all the time he's been working on this, he's not seen anything like what he thinks is only 10 years down the track, which is that we could be on the brink of effectively curing a large portion of cancers.

I just think that's astonishing.

And I'm sure a lot of people listening today will have had a conversation at some point in their lives where they were told that someone they knew had cancer.

And those conversations are always incredibly difficult and painful for everyone involved.

And this idea that we might be only a decade away from a place where people find out they have cancer at such an early stage that it is a routine part of managing their health.

The treatment that they then have to undergo is routine, is straightforward.

It's not intensive.

It's not dramatically changing their life, worsening their quality of life.

That for me is just truly astonishing, that the cure for cancer, for all intents and purposes, could be that close around the corner.

And look, you know, this is a programme where we talk about radical change every week, but curing cancer in a decade?