Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
303 | James P. Allison on Fighting Cancer with the Immune System
Mon, 27 Jan 2025
A typical human lifespan is approximately three billion heartbeats in duration. Lasting that long requires not only intrinsic stability, but an impressive capacity for self-repair. Nevertheless, things do occasionally break down, and cancer is one of the most dramatic examples of such breakdown. Given that the body is generally so good at protecting itself, can we harness our internal security patrol - the immune system - to fight cancer? This is the hope of Nobel Laureate James Allison, who works on studying the structure and behavior of immune cells, and ways to coax them into fighting cancer. This approach offers hope of a way to combat cancer effectively, lastingly, and in a relatively gentle way.Support Mindscape on Patreon.Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/01/27/303-james-p-allison-on-fighting-cancer-with-the-immune-system/James P. Allison received his Ph.D. in biology from the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently Regental Professor and Chair of the Department of Immunology, the Olga Keith Wiess Distinguished University Chair for Cancer Research, Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Research, and Director of the James P. Allison Institute at MD Anderson Cancer Center. He is the subject of the documentary film Jim Allison: Breakthrough. Among his numerous awards are the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.Web pageNobel Prize citationGoogle Scholar publicationsWikipediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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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.
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