Siddhartha Mukherjee 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 graduated from Stanford and Oxford where he received a PhD studying cancer-causing viruses and from Harvard Medical School where his lab 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, how to think about a cancer diagnosis, the biology of cancer, how the mapping of the human genome has changed our understanding of cancer and the possibilities of treatment, how cancer spreads, and the difference between remission and cure. There s a lot here, and it was great to steal another hour of Siddhartha s time. Sam Harris This is a really important conversation, 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 made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So, I'm really looking forward to having this conversation because we only had about 10 minutes last time around to touch on this all too important topic. I can imagine that being an ER doc is not at all the same thing as being a dermatologist, is it? In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you ll need to subscribe to your favorite podcatcher, you'll need to SUBSCRIBE at Samharris.org, which will help you become a supporter of the podcast, by becoming a member of The Making Sense podcast? You'll get access to everything that we're doing here? And a chance to hear more like that, I'll be hearing more of it, I won't need to become a member, I get it, too, I know that I'm making sense, I can get more of that, right? - Sam Harris, too says it, right he s got it, he says so, I hear you, too he s not just that, he s made it, so I'll hear it, I'll say it, He s made that right, right He s not only that, so he s that too, right I say it.