On:New frontiers in cancer therapy, medicine, and the writing process
Episode: 32
Date: December 2018
Background: oncologist, researcher, and author of the “The Gene”, “The Laws of Medicine”).
Key Subjects:
- Rules of writings:
- No long stretches of science without a human element / pay-off.
- Everyone should be able to read the book.
- Only include research if it results in a concrete human intervention.
- Cancer and prevention.
- Very few preventable, human chemical carcinogens of substantial impact.
- Obesity may be one that has similar level of impact as smoking.
- The three laws of medicine.
- Strong intuition is more powerful than a weak test.
- Bayesian law.
- Everything has priors, understand priors before understand posteriors.
- Perhaps wired to be Bayesian.
- Normals teach us rules, outliers teach us laws.
- Anti-Bayesian law.
- Complex interactions can produce outliers.
- Less wired to understand outliers.
- Every experiment is accompanied by a bias.
- Every declarative claim comes with a bias.
- Warrants skepticism.
- Strong intuition is more powerful than a weak test.
- Cancer research (or, research more generally).
- First: questions are non-linear.
- Need to find the right paradigm, perspective.
- Then: questions become non-linear.
- Understanding the mechanisms within the new paradigm.
- First: questions are non-linear.
- Cancer and metabolics.
- Does the metabolism of cancer cells differ from normal cells?
- There may be many metabolic pathways for cancer cells that are different from normal cells.
- Target these pathways and you may be able to affect the cancer.
- When a drug is administered, does it change the metabolism of normal and/or cancer cells?
- Reaction to a drug could be a mechanism by which cancer cells become sensitive or resistant to treatment.
- Does the metabolism of cancer cells differ from normal cells?
- Skills:
- Create: throw something at the world.
- Be open: listen to what comes back.
- 8/10