303 | James P. Allison on Fighting Cancer with the Immune System
episode
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
1h 11m
7 speakers
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Cancer is one of the most terrible things we have to deal with in human life. It's a potentially fatal disease, of course. You know, we're all going to die someday. That's something that maybe we can make our peace with. But unlike many other diseases, cancer seems arbitrary in ways that are hard to pin down. It can happen to anyone. It can happen at any stage of your life. Young people can get it as well as old people. When you reach a certain stage of your life, like I have, not only do you have to worry about checking for it yourself, but you know people who have had cancer and even who have died because of it.
So it's very natural that as a species, we put a lot of effort into figuring out what is going on, how to stop this. It turns out to be really, really difficult, as maybe you know. Today's conversation is going to be with one of the world's leaders in the field of fighting cancer, James Allison, who won the Nobel Prize a few years ago in physiology and medicine for one of the ways, one of the various techniques that we can use to attack cancer once it starts. The idea being rather than going in and just zapping the cells with radiation or chemicals or whatever... that we can use immunotherapy. In other words, we learn how to cajole the body's own existing immune system to fight the cancer tumors. And if this can work, it works in some cases, doesn't work in others yet. This is what we're studying and we'll talk about in the episode.
But it's not just a more kind of organic, natural way to fight the disease, but then the person who has had the therapy has that extra layer of protection against getting cancer going forward. You haven't just killed that tumor or most of that tumor. You've built up the body's defense systems. So, of course, that is, for real world purposes, a fascinating and important development.
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7 identifiedMore from Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
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