Azra Raza: Can We Cure Cancer? How We (Mis)Treat Cancer, How We Can Do Better, and Why We Must

Dr Azra Raza is a Professor of Medicine, Clinical Director of the Evans Foundation MDS Center, and Executive Director of The First Cell Coalition for Cancer Survivors at Columbia University in New York. She is the best-selling author of "The First Cell: And the human costs of pursuing cancer to the last". She started her research in Myelodysplastic Syndromes (MDS) in 1982 and moved to Rush University, Chicago, Illinois in 1992, where she was the Charles Arthur Weaver Professor in Oncology and Director, Division of Myeloid Diseases. The MDS Program, along with a Tissue Repository containing more than 50,000 samples from MDS and acute leukemia patients was successfully relocated to the University of Massachusetts in 2004 and to Columbia University in 2010. Before moving to New York, Dr Raza was the Chief of Hematology Oncology and the Gladys Smith Martin Professor of Oncology at the University of Massachusetts in Worcester. She has published the results of her laboratory research and clinical trials in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Blood, Cancer, Cancer Research, the British Journal of Hematology, Leukemia, and Leukemia Research. Dr Raza serves on numerous national and international panels as a reviewer, consultant, and advisor and is the recipient of a number of awards.TIMESTAMPS:(0:00) - Introduction (0:50) - The First Cell: and the human costs of pursuing cancer to the last(4:10) - Defining Cancer(7:50) - A Cancer Paradigm Shift: Finding the First Cell(11:16) - "The Cure for Cancer"(19:05) - Azra's Journey, Development & Reception(24:40) - Hope, Honesty & Harm in a Clinical Setting(33:00) - Current Medical Politics vs Revolutionary Detections/Treatments(39:00) - Increasing Lifespan & Healthspan(43:01) - "Michael Levin Should Win The Nobel Prize!"(51:00) - A Good Life & a Good Death(56:00) - How Words distort our relationship with Disease(1:00:00) - How Disease & Death Shape Our Lives(1:05:40) - The First Cell Book(1:09:15) - A Better Healthcare System(1:12:27) - Conclusion EPISODE LINKS:- Azra's Website: https://azraraza.com- Azra's Books: https://azraraza.com/books- Azra's X: https://x.com/AzraRazaMD- Azra's YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/@AzraRazaMDCONNECT:- Website: https://tevinnaidu.com - Podcast: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/mindbodysolution- YouTube: https://youtube.com/mindbodysolution- Twitter: https://twitter.com/drtevinnaidu- Facebook: https://facebook.com/drtevinnaidu - Instagram: https://instagram.com/drtevinnaidu- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/drtevinnaidu=============================Disclaimer: The information provided on this channel is for educational purposes only. The content is shared in the spirit of open discourse and does not constitute, nor does it substitute, professional or medical advice. We do not accept any liability for any loss or damage incurred from you acting or not acting as a result of listening/watching any of our contents. You acknowledge that you use the information provided at your own risk. Listeners/viewers are advised to conduct their own research and consult with their own experts in the respective fields.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
That is the question I really came to answer.
Here is my solution. This is the cure for cancer I'm
holding in my hand and the cure is not in the syringe.
The cure is in the needle. Henry Ford said something very
important 19/09. He said if I asked my customers
what they want, they would have said a faster horse.
Instead I gave them an automobile.
So I'm saying that the stentanylis a Concorde in the time of

(00:24):
horse carriages. Azrick, your work as an
oncologist, as a medical professional, it's incredible
and you've done so much in the field.
And your book is titled The First Cell, which is a beautiful
title. And let's dissect that a bit.
Why would you name a book The First Cell?

(00:46):
And for all those watching or listening, this is about
fundamentally about cancer, something you've been
fundamentally affected by personally and in and in your
work life. In search for the first cell.
Are we actually chasing something far more human, a way
to live wisely or die well? And if you could redesign the
entire Cancer Research apparatusscientifically, ethically,

(01:11):
philosophy, philosophically, what would it look like?
I think that's a great beginningthere actually, because to lay
out right up front my concept ofthe first cell is goes to the
heart and soul of this whole discussion that's about to come.

(01:34):
In summary, the title The First Cell and the Human Costs of
Pursuing Cancer to the last is acry against human ego, pride,
hubris, arrogance, thinking thatwe can take something at end

(02:00):
stage monstrous disease and still be able to dissect
everything, understand every single generic change signalling
pathway and reverse it and cure cancer.
So that is my concept that the first cell is an idea where you

(02:26):
don't wait for complexity to develop and think you can solve
it from that point on and ratherstart at just trying to detect
what is the first evidence of that Wellness to illness
transition. Can we pick that up?
That should be the earliest consequence.

(02:47):
And the second thing around thisconcept of the first cell is
those of us like you and me who go to medical school, we really
go to medical school with this whole concept.
This since whenever we decided to go to Med school, the idea is
go in and treat illness. And so you automatically only

(03:08):
think of treatment. You don't think of finding it
before it becomes treatment. And so I'm actually challenging
the entire Hippocratic Oath, which is first, do no harm.
Remember, that's how it begins. I'm saying first preempt all

(03:28):
harm. That's the concept of the first
thing, so. It's a, it's a complete
philosophical shift in thinking.And I think when you look at
society today, we're, we're fundamentally, you can sort of
see a change in, in, in this entire world where people are
looking at Wellness and trying to realize that, look, when you

(03:49):
wait for illnesses doesn't, you're probably too late.
And, and I think your work encapsulates this perfectly.
You're trying to make sure that people understand that we cannot
wait. In fact, waiting is the problem.
And, and as doctors today, we shouldn't be focusing on
treating illness. It should be more about
prevention and more about looking before something occurs.

(04:10):
With that said, Azra, how would you define cancer?
Again, that goes to the heart ofthe thing.
People think of cancer as a genetic disease, for example.
To me it is anything but, because that is too reductionist
to think the way I think of cancer.

(04:33):
And I'll give you an example of a sand pile effect, which is if
you start dropping sand grains of sand one by one, they will
make a pile and they will keep forming a pile that becomes in
the shape of a pyramid. But then you drop 1 grain of
sand and suddenly the pile collapses.

(04:57):
If you're looking for the reasons for collapsing of the
pile or this avalanche that happened in the properties of
the last grain of sand you dropped, then you're completely
mistaken because that last grainof sand was no different than
the rest of the hundreds of thousands that came before it.
The difference was in the pile which had become unstable, which

(05:19):
was under crisis. And so the whole idea of cancer
that appears is to me more, muchmore of a systemic disease then
it has been assigned credit for.Because if you think of
pancreatic cancer, very often itwill begin with something that

(05:43):
over 150 years ago was named theTrousseau sign, right?
It's suddenly somebody will present with a clot in their
shin in their calf, sorry. And so you are thinking clot in
the calf. Why would they have that?
And they turn out to have pancreatic cancer.
So what is the systemic reaction, this thromboembolic

(06:06):
event that happened far away from the organ of origin, It is
a systemic illness and that we are ignoring all of those
things. Second important thing about
what's cancer, cancer is directly the incidence of cancer
is directly proportional to age.For for instance,

(06:26):
myelodysplastic syndrome, the form of pre leukemia that I am
an expert in the incidence is 2 per 100,000 at the age of 50,
but at the age of 70 to 80 it is80 per 100,000.
So what has changed? Aging.

(06:48):
What is happening in aging? Every system is becoming a
little decrepit. So it's a systematic systemic
failure where that one last grain of sand or one generic
mutation could cause the whole system to shut down.
And those are called power laws,where the crisis occurs in terms
of power laws. So I think this is the way I

(07:10):
think of cancer. This is the way I think of the
first cell. This is the way I think of the
whole healthcare system that hasevolved to treat disease and
illness and give yourself gold medals and Nobel prizes for
that, whereas ignoring everything that is coming
before. Do you agree with me?

(07:31):
I think you're absolutely right.And there's, it's sort of, it
sort of shows us our own ignorance and the limits of
knowledge. I mean, do you think that our
focus on late stage interventions reflect a deeper
failure in how medicine understands and applies
knowledge in general? Well, of course you.

(07:56):
Absolutely, Yeah, yeah. I mean absolutely.
Because the whole idea behind behind medicine acquiring
knowledge has been reduced to mapping genes, identifying

(08:18):
pathways, you know, understanding the immune system,
trying to really go into detailsof of all kinds of microscopic
events, etcetera. But all that knowledge gives you

(08:40):
power, yes, because knowledge ispower.
But if that power is applied to the wrong end of the treatment
paradigm, then it can become very dangerous and hurtful.
And that, I'm afraid, is what weare doing because all of that
technology we are using to define all these things should

(09:02):
be applied to finding the first cell and what has gone wrong at
inception rather than waiting and applying it at that stage.
So here I feel there's a big sort of big gap between all this
mountains of petabytes of knowledge versus using it

(09:24):
wisely. And what's the difference
between knowledge and wisdom? Simply, while knowledge is
power, wisdom is using that knowledge with empathy, with
compassion, with mercy in your heart.
Because for God's sake, we are doctors.
We are supposed to help patientsand reduce their suffering,

(09:45):
which doesn't just come with disease.
There are psychological traumas.There's a whole violation which
are not just psychic and emotional and spiritual, but all
kinds of violations. So I feel like your question
about this knowledge thing is a very key question in medicine
right now, because we are accumulating mountains of

(10:05):
knowledge, but at the wrong kindof things, is what I'm saying.
And using it badly, yes. What do you think of that?
Do you agree with me? I think I do.
And it's, it's not just, I mean,within the Cancer Research
field, you're right. It's, it's, it's within
medicine. It's it's almost a cancer within
medicine itself. It's, it's ironic that that's
exactly what's happening. And you see this all the time

(10:27):
with obesity, with heart disease, all these typical
illnesses that we know if you could pre pre empt all of this,
treat it as if it's always been a thing that might occur.
We can reduce risk so much. We know that all the food that
we it's processed to refine carbs, all these negative
aspects to reality, smoking, alcohol, etcetera.
It just doesn't stop. But it's still so socially

(10:49):
accepted and and it's and it's become part of life in such a
systemically infected way that it's difficult to find the first
cell and locate it and treat it at this point.
But for anyone who's not familiar with your work and
hasn't read the book, if you hadto describe the aim of finding
the first cell and what that entails, what that does, and how

(11:11):
looking at it from this lens would change the landscape of
medicine, how would you express this or explain it?
That is the question I really came to answer.
Here is my solution. This is the cure for cancer I'm
holding in my hand, and the cureis not in the syringe.
The cure is in the needle. What is in the needle?

(11:34):
In the needle is a stent, like acoronary stent.
Literally. A coronary stent was taken by
two brilliant biomedical engineers, Sam Shepherd and
sorry, Sam Sia and Ken Shepherd at Columbia University.
And I've been working with them for a decade on on this whole

(11:57):
concept. And what they did tab is they
took a coronary stent and they fabricated it with electronics.
So they put 2 electrodes, 2 transducers and built in a
little chip which is a computer.And this tent is folded up, is
present in this needle. So this stent can be injected in

(12:19):
your subclavian vein and it stays there.
And what it does is this is the device, an implantable device we
call the stentanyl. Do you like the name Stent
Sentinel? Samsia came up with the name
stentanyl. So the stentanyl's job is

(12:41):
literally to stay in your body forever like a coronary stent
and detect the first cell. How does it do so well?
The stent will create an electric field between its two
walls or in in its circumferencean electric field is created.

(13:01):
Any cell that passes through theelectrical field is going to
cause impedance of electricity which is immediately recorded as
a signal on the computer or chipthat is built onto the stent.
So if a cell is small, it creates a small signal which is
recorded. But we have shown that the first
cell is a giant cell. Think of it like this.

(13:24):
If the largest white blood cell is like 1415 microns in size,
these cells can be 100 to 300 microns in size.
Because our work has shown that the first cell is really a
hybrid combination of two cells that fuse under stress.
So think of it, this tent sitting in your vein forever can

(13:46):
detect, not only detect the first cell going through,
because it's a giant cell by size and impedance of electrical
current, they can program it to electrocute that cell.
This needle that you're seeing and the stent in it has cost $50

(14:07):
million, ten years of work just to make the stent.
So this didn't happen overnight,but it is ready for prime time
now. What is my contribution to the
stenton? And my contribution is, OK, you
guys make the stent and I'm going to identify what we need

(14:30):
to detect through it. So in nine in 2015, that is
exactly 10 years ago, I fit my research lab with a filtration
device and just started filtering the blood of my
patients who have pre leukemia hoping to find the first
leukemia cell. I would just filter their blood

(14:52):
and the first leukemia cell. As you know blasts are larger
than normal cells so I thought by size.
So we worked with a company fromFrance called Rare Cells who
gave us their who did a beautiful collaborative research
project with us. And after filtering hundreds and
hundreds of patients, we startedfinding, we saw that there are

(15:13):
these giant cells. What are they?
And when I we went to look into the literature, it turns out
that people who have been working in the area have found
that every single person with a solid cancer, whether the cancer
is in the brain, in the ovaries,in the lungs, in the liver,

(15:34):
these giant cells are found circulating in the blood and
they are associated with relapseand recurrence.
So we also started finding thesegiant cells.
So while the biomedical engineers made the stent, we
found the cells. And now I have been collecting

(15:55):
tissues of blood, saliva, bone marrow, biopsies, everything on
my patients since 1984. Today I have the largest tissue
repository in the world of patients whose samples have been
saved longitudinally as they go through natural histories of
their cancer. And so I have this entire tissue

(16:19):
repository. Of course, I published hundreds
of papers studying smaller numbers of samples from here and
made important biologic insights, but I've always saved
extra samples from every single sample.
I take that ultimately when the multi omics technology, when the

(16:39):
right technology comes along, I want to have all the samples to
go and find the biomarkers. So basically my idea is
revolutionize early detection tocure cancer.
Don't wait for cancer to become the end stage disease and try to
treat it, which has failed for 50 years.
You've been trying. You haven't succeeded very much

(17:00):
except occasional successes. By and large, if you have stage
4 cancer, mostly you die. So the idea is to cure cancer,
revolutionize early detection. Early detection means you since
no age is immune from cancer, you need to have detection
available from birth to death. And since cancer is a silent

(17:23):
killer, it can come anytime. You can't afford to do the test
once a year or once every six months.
You got to have continuous monitoring of some your body
like treat the body as a machineand just monitor for everything
you possibly can continuously. So this tentanyl tab can scan

(17:46):
the entire 5 liters of blood that will pass through the stent
every 18 days. So every 18 days, once the stent
is in, we are finding the first cell and electrocuting it right
there. Could you imagine a better
paradigm for any disease? And the Stenton will be able to

(18:07):
detect dementia any, any biomarkers, Because the
biomedical engineers, Ken and Sam are so brilliant, they have
used this small molecule field electronics transistor
technology also to detect small pieces of protein, small pieces
of RNA, small pieces of DNA, notjust large cells.

(18:29):
They can do all of this now. So any disease is going to shed
its own unique biomarkers, pick it up early and boom, take care
of it right there. That's my paradigm.
Do you like? I love it.
It's pretty incredible when you,when you look at this, you
firstly, I have many questions come to mind.

(18:50):
One would be when you saw Ken and Sam's work, at what point
did you guys first start collaborating?
When did you realize you're ontosomething with the stentanyl?
And the other thing is how's thereception been when you look at
current oncologists and the community, the scientific
community, how's that been with the reception?
So how long? Well, when I started to do the

(19:13):
filtration on my patients 10 years ago, I also looked to see
who can I work with in terms of biomedical engineers.
And at Columbia, Sam Sia had come from MIT and he had
established he, he was there forseven years when I discovered
him. And he had formed this thing
called Lab on a Chip. So I looked into the Columbia

(19:39):
biomedical guys and I sought himout and I went and met him.
And in fact, he has written partof the thing in, in my book is
by him and about him. I've written about him and about
this whole concept of doing things with him.
So the book was published six years ago already.
So I had been working with Sam for a while.

(19:59):
So practically 10 years we've been working on it.
And as I said, it has taken $50 million, ten years of work.
It's a lot of stuff gone into it.
We didn't know what we are goingto develop as we were working in
our respective labs. But then our things kept coming
together. And as I'm developing these

(20:22):
markers, I don't want to test for them once a year.
I don't want to test for them once every six months.
So we keep talking about and developing these similar things.
How has the reception been? You know, for 40 years I have
been saying the same thing, which is early detection and
prevention. No one can accuse me of being

(20:46):
inconsistent. Please go back 40 years in my
career and look at any of my papers.
My point was I started by treating acute myeloid leukemia
immediately. Within a few years it was clear
to me that in my lifetime this deadly disease won't be cured.
So I asked myself, what's a goodnews we can give a cancer

(21:08):
patient when we tell them their diagnosis?
Only good news is we found it early.
So how do you find leukemia early?
Because by the time you diagnosethere are hundreds of millions
of cells all over. So I said the only way to find
it is find people who are at risk of getting leukemia.
And very quickly I found there are those patients who they are

(21:30):
labeled as pre leukemia or myelodysplastic syndrome.
So in 1984 I turned my entire focus to MD's pre leukemia and
following these patients as theydevelop leukemia.
So I have been saying this constantly.
Everyone I speak to, I give tonsof talks and podcasts and

(21:54):
written a book. I mean I'm trying everything
possible. People listen to me and say,
yes, we know that early detection is early, but the
money, the grant money is in finding this or establishing
this model. So why aren't you studying human
samples? Because the money is all in
mouse models. It's such a travesty that 2

(22:17):
million patients, new patients, are diagnosed with cancer every
year. 2 million and a few thousand samples are saved by a
couple of researchers. No one thinks of saving samples.
Why? Because they have developed this
delusional system that's taking human cells, putting them into

(22:37):
some damaged immunocompromised mouse or some Petri dish and
treating it and developing a treatment is going to work well.
95% of those are still failing today, those preclinical testing
platforms that yields the treatment strategies.
The failure rate today of any experimental therapy in cancer

(23:01):
is 95%. And the 5% that succeed, in my
opinion, should have failed because they're prolonging
survival of 30% patients by 2.1 months and becoming financially
ruined in the bargain because the cost is 100,000 to more.
Kartis cost $1,000,000. I mean the whole system is so

(23:24):
delusional, so sick and so absurd that you would laugh
unless it was tragically taking human lives every day.
To this day, I'm the one seeing 30 to 40 cancer patients in my
clinic every week. I'm the one on the frontline,
I'm the one treating them. So how am I going to face them

(23:44):
and say that in 1977 I was treating your acute leukemia
with two drugs that we refer to as seven and three, because
seven days of Pharisee, 3 days of Donomycin.
Today in 2025, I have the same 2drugs to offer you 7 and three.
How shameful is it? But people are doing it every
day around me without even thinking about it.

(24:08):
So you tell me, what should be the reception I would expect
from this field that has treatedme so badly for 40 years?
It, it's, it's disappointing, but also exciting to know that
you've, you guys have done some groundbreaking work, even though
the there's this tension. I mean, I have one of my

(24:29):
questions here was about hope, honesty, and harm.
How do you navigate the tension between offering hope and being
honest in the clinic, especiallywhen aggressive treatments do
more harm most of the time than good?
Well, that question takes us to a very important area that I'm

(24:53):
interested in, which is what is the difference between cure and
healing? For most of the time, we don't
have cures for at least the leukemias I'm treating, unless
you send them to transplant, which is possible for less than
5% patients. And the results of that are very
horrible too. So for most patients, the

(25:14):
disease will take their lives. And how?
I mean, can you can imagine thatI've had thousands and thousands
of these conversations continuously with patients.
So that's where you learn the difference between cure and
healing. And the way I think of it is in

(25:35):
terms of a couplet from Urdu, which is my language.
And I'll read the couplet translate for you and tell you
the meaning because you've askeda profound question right now.
This is not, cannot be answered in some glib kind of way.
Khalid, one of our greatest poets, has a couplet that says

(25:57):
Tawfiq Banda zei himmat hai azelsi aankho mehe wo patra ju
gohar nahuat. Your success depends on your
endurance. How much can you tolerate?
How much are you going to risk? That's the first line.

(26:18):
Endurance is important, but the second line is so shocking.
The teardrop in your eye is the one that didn't become the
Pearl. And so when you connect the 2
lines, let me explain it to you.The 2 lines are connected by a
concept in our poetry, which is that if the seasons first rains,

(26:43):
first few raindrops go into the mouth of a clam, they become a
Pearl. So now Ghalib the poet is trying
to console those raindrops that were not the first raindrops of
the first rain of the season because now they have no chance
of becoming a Pearl right by definition.

(27:06):
So Ghalib is telling them, thinkof it, if you don't become a
Pearl, you weren't lucky enough to be the first raindrop, you
now have a chance of becoming that teardrop that comes out of
the eye of a lover. And how much more meaningful is
that one teardrop compared to a Pearl?

(27:28):
So my point is, while cure is that Pearl healing is that
teardrop, that empathy, that compassion, realizing that once
there is no hope, then you can'tlook a year in a ahead or even,
you know, months ahead, then thelack of hope becomes the driver

(27:51):
for now, because suddenly you can't hope to go forward.
So now becomes important. Everything you haven't done
becomes more precious. Every relationship you have not
nourished, you need to do something about.
Suddenly you have a chance to doall of that.
So with my patience, while I'm trying for the Pearl, the cure,

(28:14):
I'm also offering the teardrop the time with them.
Presence rather than procedures are as important here.
Talking to them, helping them navigate these last stages of
their journey of life, helping them reconnect with everything
that they possibly can and have to, and giving them not just

(28:37):
false hope, but hope in other things that's become very
meaningful. I hope that answers this
question. It does, I think it's it's it's
a firstly, that is a very beautiful couplet and the
application of the way you've brought that into the into this
topic is also profound. And it's a great way to sort of

(28:58):
think of this and that. Q are not being the the sole
importance. Do you think that capitalism and
like within healthcare has become the let's say, I mean, I
don't like to this is fundamentally A philosophical
podcast, of course, and it's notusually medical.
But when I read through your work and Mike Levin was the one
who introduced us, who Mike's been a guest on this channel
many times. And when I read through it, I

(29:20):
figured that this if I'm going to do something about medicine,
it needs to have this deep philosophical meaning behind it.
And yours does. And that's, and you've touched
on that right now, this mind andbody connection meaning in, in
your experience, how much have you seen the impact of mental
stress, mental states, grief, resilience, and even people's

(29:43):
perceptions of meaning affect the course of their illnesses?
A lot, hands down. There is a lot of effect of how
you are handling the disease presence, mindfulness, how the
journey becomes so much less painful but has actual effect on

(30:04):
the disease process. In fact, because there are now
many, many studies to show that how these kinds of even
breathing exercises, even mindfulness that is practiced
through meditation can improve immune responses, can bring a

(30:26):
more positive light for everything.
I mean, right now as you know that our entire healthcare
system is profit driven. It is something where a patient
has become a consumer and illness is being treated as a
market. And to me, one of the most

(30:48):
perverse results of this kind ofthinking is that all the
negative studies are just buried.
They're not even talked about. But the minor glimmer one
patient responded out of 49 treated will become the anecdote
that's talked about on every international meeting stage.

(31:08):
So I feel like this whole revenue generating thing has has
brought an absence of the real physician role that we are
supposed to play, an acceptance of death and the necessity of
walking people through death, which is coming for all of us,

(31:30):
is now conceived, considered a defeat of failure.
Well, death is not a failure. Denying death is a failure.
Accepting death and helping people navigate this difficult
journey is so important, not just for mindfulness, but even
for their disease that feels less burdensome.

(31:52):
Even if it is not being actuallyhelp, which there are studies
that show it can be actually help.
But I don't want to go out thereand have every scientist attack
me and say, oh, she believes in all this voodoo stuff of
positive thinking, etcetera. I think there's clearly things
to be said for positive thinking, yes.

(32:16):
I I agree, I think that it's very difficult.
I mean, people want a quick fix.They want they want the easiest
option and sometimes the easiestoption is just not the answer.
I mean, it takes, as you said, endurance, effort, putting in
the work, exercise, eating well,diet, locating the first cell,
which seems to be a task that takes years, of course, to do.

(32:39):
How in terms of the not, not, I wouldn't say reception, but
knowing that they could be something so profoundly
impactful like having this device, the Stenton, having
this, this piece of equipment that can change the game
completely. Do you think that because of the
profitable companies out there that your work gets shoved down

(33:00):
a little bit lower due to this urge for money and and profit?
Because I mean, it's not going to be unless this product itself
is sold as an expensive product.Once we start finding cures and
making this cheaper and easily implementing it, it's going to
drastically reduce costs over time, which which wouldn't work

(33:21):
with this current market. Especially now knowing that
within certain countries, funding for Cancer Research has
dropped significantly since recent political developments.
Yeah, well, the first idea I have, I came from a third world
country, I come from Pakistan. And every year when I would go

(33:42):
back to Pakistan, especially when my parents were alive for
the 1st 25 years, I've had to see patients constantly because
my mother would have a long listof things of patients.
I had to go visit and provide free care to them.
And it's such a it's almost criminal to not democratize

(34:04):
medicine, to develop therapies that belong to only the very
rich few. Even in this country.
We are just robbing patients. Do you know that 42% of all
people who are diagnosed with cancer in America, 42% that's
nearly half will become completely financially ruined by

(34:25):
the 2nd year. So forget third world, we in the
first world we are we have brought the whole system on the
verge of a collapse because of our greed and hubris.
But you know Henry Ford said something very important
nineteen O 9. He said if I asked my customers
what they want, they would have said a faster horse.

(34:47):
Instead I gave them an automobile.
So I'm saying that this fentanylis a Concorde in the time of
horse carriages. And you know, once, once my once
the word processor came along, who cares about the companies
making typewriter ribbons? Who cares?
The whole system flipped immediately by itself.

(35:09):
That's what I'm saying. Once this thing comes along, no
matter how much of opposition there is, it's going to flip the
system because if you don't wantto use it here, Korea and
Pakistan and China will start using it.
So I think that, and you know, I'm not some defeatist, I hope
that's very clear to you that I've been fighting the system

(35:32):
for 40 years and if anything, I'm more energized every day
because I'm refusing to stop seeing patients.
They are my real inspiration anduntil I can help them, I'm not
going to rest. One of my favorite books is
Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolution.
He published that in the 60s. But the point he made it very

(35:55):
true is that there is a paradigmthat exists at the moment.
We tend to accept that paradigm.Currently that paradigm in
cancer is treat cancer with withslash, poison or burn surgery,
chemotherapy, radiation therapy.That is our paradigm.

(36:16):
So what is happening is that allour resources are being pushed
into developing and supporting this paradigm, developing
treatments for end stage. The anomalies that appear, for
example, the treatments you are developing are failing 95% of
the time. They're being ignored.
The negative studies are being buried, right?

(36:37):
So nobody wants to think that I'm investing in a company that
has a 95% failure rate, but everyone wants to invest in that
treatment paradigm and no one wants to invest in this.
I'm saying if I get $10 million today, within 18 months, I'll
have it in people. How fast?

(36:58):
How can you accelerate 18 months, for God's sake?
But you know what? I'm meeting total resistance.
No Ezra, no early detection devices.
They're not. They're not going to be funded.
Nobody is interested. Well, I said we have
electrocuting technology. It could be treatment also.
Well, show us first. Well, to get there to show you I

(37:21):
need this money, of course. So that's the point.
And I'm not asking for $10 million because I'm out there
with my begging goal. You can invest it in a company
that will support me, not my company, but that will give the
money for this. So what I'm what the point I'm
trying to make is that markets have a nasty habit of flipping

(37:43):
quickly and learning and ditching their old masters.
If they see that there is profitability at this end now,
they'll flip around completely. So I'm not worried.
And by the way, the stent right now cost $8080 less than $100,

(38:03):
so the insertion will take $5000the procedure and every year you
just have to pay a subscription fee of $5000 because the data,
petabytes of data every second are being generated in a cloud
over your head and AI analyse toalert the system on your cell
phone. You will just get an alert on

(38:26):
your cell phone saying a giant cell has been delected and
electrocuted. Immediately, yeah.
So yeah, so for 10 years you're only spending $55,000.
That's it. For 10 years, 5000 a year and
5000 for the insertion. Compare that $250,000 where you

(38:46):
have 30% chance of response and 770% chance that you will be
damaged physically and financially.
Yeah, it's a it, you said it wonderful.
I mean, would we're drowning in data but starving for wisdom.
And you're right, we're stuck inthat Coonian science loop.
And what that was one of my questions for you at some point
was are we, we're just busy refining a broken model rather

(39:09):
than searching for new technologies and, and, and
implementing them in a way that's clearly more cost
effective and far more protective and preventative?
Absolutely, I mean. But Coon himself pointed out
that the change will come when there is a crisis in confidence
that people are, you know, thereare a lot of billionaires in

(39:31):
America now. 700 billionaires this year have been recorded and
thousands of multi millionaires.Now that they have all this
money, they want to live foreveralso.
And they're realizing that the biggest risk to their lives in
60s and 70s is now cancer. And they're also realizing that
all the companies that they havesupported have not provided the

(39:53):
treatment they were hoping for. And now, as you said, Wellness
markets are becoming much more fashionable, of course, and
lifestyle changes, etcetera, which is great.
I love all that. And they're realizing that maybe
early detection is a good idea. So I think there is a crisis of

(40:15):
confidence coming not from scientists and academics, but
from billionaires and tech venture capitalists, etcetera,
who are now at risk themselves. So unless there was that
emotional investment, I don't think we would be able to flip
the system. But now I'm feeling more
confident just because of the reasons I said, which are

(40:36):
horrible reasons, and not some academic realizing that we were
wrong. And it's you have to admit, you
have to admit that what you've been doing hasn't worked.
Nobody is willing to admit that.And you're right, you see these
social influences and people like Brian Johnson, I think
that's his name. But trying to look wherever,
yeah, you can see the impact that they're having on people.

(40:59):
Is it whether they're right or wrong, They're the status quo is
shifting and it's changing. There is some sort of a change
occurring. Yeah, I feel that too.
By the way, Brian Johnson is notall that wrong.
I treat a disease pre leukemia and for many of my patients, the
only problem is a very profound anemia for which they need blood
transfusions. So we try treatments which are

(41:21):
two or three at most and then wehave nothing to offer them.
But they can live for years, decades even.
I have some patients now who I've been treating for more than
20 years. One of those patients, I'll give
her the name Donna, her son called me.
He said, my mother is 87 years old, I'm 57.
She looks younger than me. Why?

(41:43):
I said because every two weeks I'm giving her blood from a
young person for the last 17 years and she has so much energy
for 17 years, 2 units of blood every two weeks she's
gallivanting the globe. She is one day in Aspen and one
day in South Africa going for some, you know, wonderful

(42:05):
safari. I mean that woman has so much
energy and looks younger than looks your age like 30.
Yeah, that's that's right. Unbelievable.
Yeah, well, and also I'm in South Africa, so hopefully that
Safari will help. Yes, but I was saying Brian
Johnson has something, well, something there because he takes
blood from his son. Yes, he is.

(42:27):
And I think there's, the more he's doing, the more doctors,
physicians, surgeons, they have to keep up with it because if
he, if, if they stumble upon something that's quite unique
and not something we know about,we're automatically going to be
deemed ignorant and not really following the data.
So, so if we're ignoring it, it's, it's just as bad as even

(42:48):
following something we think might be wrong.
We sort of have to be intrigued by it, yes.
So, yeah, it's a tough one. It it you have.
I mentioned Michael Evans just now because one of the things I
was thinking about within this revolution that's occurring is
the breakthroughs in scientific,in the scientific and

(43:08):
philosophical realms, and all the shifts in changes in the way
we think about consciousness, humanity, meaning, purpose.
And Michael Evans, one of those people where he's works blurring
the lines of what we think of a cell, what we think a cell is,
how it communicates. How does a cancer cell maybe
communicate with it the rest of its cells knowing now that
electrical signals transmitted information.
Firstly, how do you and Michael know each other?

(43:29):
Because he was the one who highly recommended your work and
thanks Michael for that. And how do you think his work is
also shaped and influenced the field and will impact us as
doctors one day? Well, let me say that I love
Michael. Michael, I love you.
I adore you. I think you're the smartest
scientist alive right now, and Ithink you should get the Nobel

(43:50):
Prize. I met him serendipitously
through a cancer and evolution symposium that was held during
COVID days. I met him on Zoom.
I've never met him in person, but I became obsessed with the
guy. His work is so incredible.
And the thing, the first thing that fascinated me is that he
takes this little worm called plan, you know, planarium.

(44:14):
And if you split the planarium into two, then the head develops
a tail and the tail develops a head.
So he introduces an electric current and splits them electric
current in the dish and when he splits them, the tail part
develops 5 heads. The beauty is when you split

(44:34):
that 5 headed monster into two, now every tail part will develop
the five heads. So how did this, this
information, this monstrosity was first created, this 5 headed
monster, but then it has become inherited.
Now every time you do it to thatworm, it's going to have 5
heads. How?
Because no genes were changed, nothing like that happened.

(44:58):
And Michael so cleverly has shown that 70% decisions that a
cell makes about what it's goingto do, 70% of that those
decisions are decided by the cell membrane.
And the most important thing on the cell membrane is the
electrical potential, the exchange of those molecules.

(45:20):
And I think he what he is doing is exactly what I need to
combine with my early detection thing that clearly the ion
channels on a fused stressed cell that has become a giant
cell are going to be very different than they are on
single cells. And so how can we use those

(45:44):
kinds of information to design zapping treatments which are
completely non-toxic. And so this is what I am
intellectually very, very interested in, in collaborating
with Michael. And we keep talking about these
things and exchanging ideas and just talking to smart people

(46:06):
like Michael. I tell you, it is such a relief
for me because I'm constantly surrounded by 99.9% people I
talk to only work on mice and their only excuses because
that's where the grant money is.Their children have to go to
college. So I call it paycheck oncology.

(46:28):
We have to work off our for our paycheck, so we have to follow
the money trail. So they're very few people who
are going to think differently because the system just isn't
designed to encourage that. Luckily, I came from as an
outsider, so I wasn't indoctrinated with all these
ideas. Being a foreigner, being an
immigrant in this country has really helped me tip because I

(46:51):
refuse to think like the rest ofthem.
It hasn't been easy, but then life isn't easy.
Who wants an easy life? Yeah, now you can see that, that
that diversity shines through and you're able to think outside
the box just like Mike, because the way Mike thinks, he steps
outside the box all the time. It's Yeah, never really.
Yeah, he's never really thinkinglike everyone else.

(47:11):
He's always questioning things. So open minded as well.
And even if he disagrees with someone, he's still willing to
have such an in depth, curious conversation that I also sit and
wonder like how amazing it is. It's crazy.
You know, he has this retreat every year where he takes some
people with him that he likes totalk to and they go to Greenland

(47:32):
and he's been trying to get me to go, but I'm a biggum.
I can't go into those places andlive uncomfortable lives.
My dad was working in Uganda fora while, and the only way I
would go on a safari was if at the end of the day I could be
served with A5 course meal. Otherwise, I'm not going.
I like my comfort. I like to read my book and, you

(47:53):
know, have a civilized thing. So I refuse to go to Greenland
and live in that for whatever two weeks he likes to go to.
I'm trying to convince Michael to hold the retreat in a nice
park, National Park in Utah or Montana or somewhere where we
have civilization rather than, you know, I'm not born for cold
climates like they go to Greenland and places like that.

(48:18):
But I would do anything to spenda few days with Michael, talking
to him and just exchanging ideas, because the emergent
ideas will be so much better than what we are individually
thinking about, I'm sure. And I think there's so many
different applications that could have on your work.
I mean, when you talk, think youhave the stentanyl, you have
this information you've got. But his work also goes into

(48:41):
things like regeneration of limbs, metamorphosis, changing
cellular information fundamentally, which couldn't.
We could then ZAP something withnew information in essence and
fundamentally change that cell. So not even kill it, but rather
just change it back to a normal cell.
There's there's so many different philosophical
implications to his work and I can see how well they could fuse

(49:02):
together with yours. Yes, completely.
I couldn't agree more that they'll be a whole new paradigm
of thinking about these things, even not just doing, but
thinking. Because you talked about
knowledge versus wisdom. And for me, one of the big
differences is knowledge teachesyou what you should do, but

(49:24):
wisdom is when should you do it and should you or it not?
Those kinds of decisions, I think, are so important,
especially to kind of reclaim cancer from this capitalism that
we have established to democratize it.
And basically I want to invert this model because right now in

(49:47):
America at least, the model is that you go and study cancer in
mice. Then if you find a gene of
interest or a pathway of interest, then you come and ask
is it relevant in humans or not?I say to them, it should be just
the other way. You should be studying humans
1st and then validating it in animal models.

(50:09):
But why aren't you doing that? So their answer is we don't have
access to human tissue and this is where our institutions have
abdicated their responsibilitiesto the investigators because how
is a PhD scientist expected to get a human sample?
They have to work with a clinician who are full of
arrogance themselves. In fact, their arrogance is

(50:31):
somebody came to give grand rounds and his ego was so dense
that light was bending around him.
So this is the state of their affairs.
How are they going to ever collaborate with anyone?
But which the institutional responsibility to make all these
samples that millions of patients are walking around with

(50:51):
make them available for study. But because of some ridiculous
bureaucratic hurdle of protecting privacy or something,
they are hurting millions and millions of patients and nobody
is willing to even look at it. Yeah, it's pretty disheartening.
It's one of those things when you see it, we all see it all

(51:12):
the time. And and we, we know as doctors
wouldn't be doing when we're following the the clinical
guideline and we're just trying to follow it to its core because
medical legally we have to. There's so many other areas
where we have to think about, but we know inherently that this
is not what we wanted to do. This is not what we signed up
for. We came here to actually help
people and not really just prolong their death in a, in a,

(51:34):
in almost not the best way. And I think that raises an
important question to you when you think about it as a what
would you say is a good life andwhat would you say is a good
death? I would say that it's it's the
kind of thing I tell tell my students all the time.

(51:55):
Never marry someone you can livewith.
Only marry someone you can't live without.
See, there's a big difference. A good life isn't just to me
just making do with whatever is there.
A good life is doing things you can't live without.

(52:16):
And to me, a good death is 1 where first you feel that you
have lived a good life. That's very important that you
have some satisfaction in knowing that and success doesn't
come in here at all. If you don't mind, I'll read one

(52:37):
other couplet which summarizes my life.
Just tuju jisketi usko to napayahumne.
That which I was looking for, I didn't find.
In other words, I've been looking for a curing cancer.
I haven't cured cancer, but the second line is is bahani SE
magar dekhli dunya humne. But through this journey I

(53:00):
swallowed the world. I experienced the world.
So what the what? The Buddhists say that the only
Zen you find on top of the mountain is the Zen you brought
with yourself. To me, that is a good death.
A death that comes with knowing that you gave your all to

(53:21):
whatever it was you couldn't live without.
That's failure. Success is out of the question
here. It is what your abilities were
in order to dedicate yourself. And most importantly, it's all
about love. Love drives everything and love

(53:44):
for people, love for for your profession, love for poetry, all
of these things are driven just by love.
So I think a life which has beenlived with good relationships,
with love, with kindness, with compassion, with doing
everything you can that brings agood death.

(54:04):
And a good death, medically speaking, in one is 1, where
it's not necessarily the absenceof pain, but it is the presence
of choice. It's a presence of dignity.
It's the presence of control andknowing that I'm making the
decision myself that a doctor isn't giving me this treatment

(54:28):
to keep himself or herself out of jail because they have been
been given this algorithm to follow that.
The third line treatment for pancreatic cancer is dependent
on Western New York's market share.
So you have to give this treatment.
No, a good death is knowing thatI have control over when I want
to go to Hospice care and let nature take its course.

(54:51):
You know that to me. I don't know.
I and, and let's just let me give you one more thing.
Maybe we are running out of time, but just a poetic thing
here. I measure every grief I meet.
This is Emily Dickinson. I measure every grief I meet

(55:12):
with analytic eyes. I wonder if it weighs like mine
or has a different size. I wonder if they had it long or
did it just begin? I cannot find the date of mine.
It's been so long a pain. I wonder if it hurts to live and

(55:33):
if they have to try and whether could they choose between they
would not rather die. That is a good dip.
That's that's absolutely beautiful.
And, and I would be rumors if I did not mention that for all of
those watching and listening, Azura is actually a very good

(55:56):
poet as well. And you should check on homework
because your, your work is pretty phenomenal as well.
But Azura, you, you touched on something beautifully, Dave, the
words and, and how that matters so much.
And someone named Susan Sontag warned us once against these
metaphors of illness. I mean, when we think of cancer

(56:17):
and language, we think of thingslike battles, warriors, victory.
How do you think that this distorts our relationship to
disease? Well, you know, semantics of, of
war and battle kind of have a binary effect that there are
winners and there are losers. And that to me, first of all, is

(56:40):
blaming the victim. If the cancer patient dies, it's
their fault. They didn't try hard enough.
They didn't fight, they didn't have the weapons of positive
thinking or whatever it is you've decided to put in their
thing. I mean, all this kind of stuff
is in a way taking away the complexity of life, the
complexity of living, and tryingto reduce it into few phrases

(57:05):
and words. And that is just wrong.
I think Susan Santak is absolutely correct.
I have always reacted against these semantics myself, because
really the only war going on in a cancer patient is a civil war,
because they have not only cancer, now we are giving them
poisonous treatments. And so their whole body is

(57:27):
trying to attack. You don't know who's the enemy.
Is the cancer the enemy or this poison coming in?
The enemy. The body is confused and there's
a civil war going on. There is no other war, for God's
sake. And again, the other thing that
this language does, at least as far as I'm concerned, is it kind

(57:51):
of paints the paints. By by using this military
language, you are making patients into generals who have
the decision power or doctors into these captains of the ship.
And none of that is true. For God's sake, all of us are

(58:11):
ignorant. We don't know.
There is a just one example after my own husband died with a
five year battle of cancer. My daughter was only four when
he was diagnosed so she's very little.
When he died she was 8 and some after he's dead like 2-3 weeks

(58:31):
later. She developed a flu and was
pretty sick with it but slowly started getting better.
Week later she was much better, except one morning she woke up
and came out of her room crying inconsolably.
So as a mother, my heart sank immediately that something is
wrong. I said, shares out what?
Are you sick? Are you worse?

(58:52):
What's happening? And she couldn't even answer me
for a few minutes. Finally she said no Mommy, I'm
feeling much better now. But now I know how horrible it
feels to be sick and how good itfeels to get better.
And my dad never got better. You're taking all this

(59:17):
experience away by saying Harveylost the battle to cancer.
What about all that suffering and pain and the anguish of of
of just leaving such a young child behind?
What? Where is all that gone suddenly?

(59:38):
That's such a profound thing to say as a four year old.
And it and it takes you back to this one thing of where we all
have 99 problems or 1000 problems until you only have
one. And that's sickness.
The moment you have that one thing that's strikes you an
illness, a disease, a cancer, that's when you realize
everything you've been thinking about was was such surface level

(59:58):
BS. Yeah.
And at some point. Yeah, and then at some point you
struck with this one life changing event that will forever
change who you are and who everyone around you is, which is
pretty crazy. And by the way, young people
know this difference. So Sharzad's best.
Sharzad's first loses her fatheras a child.

(01:00:20):
And as a young adult of 22, her best friend Andrew, not her
boyfriend R Andrew was gay. But her best friend dies of
deadly glioblastoma multiforme, the most horrible brain cancer
known to mankind. He's dying at 22.
So a week before he's dead in the hospital, the team just

(01:00:45):
comes and hands him ADNR form tosign Do not resuscitate.
He said, I'm not signing it. I don't want to die.
Send them off. But that evening tip his mother
left and his father came to relieve her to spend the night
with his son. As soon as the father came,

(01:01:06):
Andrew called the team back and said bring me the form, I'll
sign it now. I couldn't do it in front of my
mother because she wouldn't be able to take 22 year old is
protecting his mother. Monuments should be built to
this quiet courage, this reverence.

(01:01:30):
We should be hanging our heads down in reference to Andrew.
Your, your life other has been personally touched by this and
you've impacted the field in so many incredible ways because of
that. The legacy that you, your
husband has left you with as well, and the way he's impacted

(01:01:50):
you. How do you feel that that's
changed how you perceive this, this, this world and cancer as
all? I think you hit it on the head
because I didn't change really as an oncologist, even though I
was his oncologist, but I was already an oncologist for 20

(01:02:13):
years when he was diagnosed. So it didn't change my style,
but what it changed is my perceptions forever.
And as Bruce said, to discover new lands, you don't need to.
You just need to have new eyes. You don't need to travel.
And so just the same thing I wasseeing as amputating a leg to

(01:02:35):
cure a child with cancer. Now I'm seeing and feeling good
about it, that we cured the child.
Now I suddenly see that amputation as a travesty, as a
horrible crime. How are we still doing it 50
years and 100 years later? So I think that what it has done
for me is to discover the difference between discerning

(01:03:04):
when to act and not. Can we or should we become
suddenly very important? Because I am now deciding not
just as a doctor, but as also from the patient's perspective,
because Harvey handed me his decision power.
And the most interesting thing to me was that for five years

(01:03:27):
that he was sick, everything I did, arranging for babysitters
or making sure that my lab is running, any, any decision I had
to make was always guided by Harvey's illness.
Do I have to give him chemo at this time?
So I must do this at that time, you know, So for five years, the
focus of attention of every choice I made in life was his

(01:03:50):
illness. And he dies, and suddenly I'm
feeling disoriented. Of course the death was
expected. That's not the point.
The point is that focus was suddenly gone.
And again, Emily Dickinson, I felt a cleavage in my mind, as
if my brain had split. I tried to match it seam by

(01:04:15):
seam, but could not make them fit the thought behind.
I strove to join unto the thought before, but sequence
raveled out of reach like balls upon the floor.
The disorientation and the appreciation of what patients

(01:04:37):
and families are going through that they can't.
You see, when you are in that active mode, adrenaline is
driving everything you are doingand you have no time to think.
You need time you need. I needed years even to go back
and listen to music and the way I healed myself for two years I
couldn't concentrate on anythinguntil I decided to reread the

(01:05:02):
100 greatest books of Western literary tradition, starting
with Sophocles and and Aeschylusand working my way down to
Thackery and Dickens and and James to now Rushti and
Ferrante. I mean to, to really, because
that's all I know how to do. I'm a big reader, as you can

(01:05:23):
see. My I just said I'm owner of
thousands of books everywhere. So that reset my mind.
But then it made me realize whatpatients and and their families
go through. Patient dies, but now you know,
how long is it going to come back to real to their old life
or ever? Will they ever get back to that?

(01:05:44):
And what do they think about what decisions they would have
changed? And in my book, The First Cell,
I think something that is very unique in the book is that there
are 7 chapters. Each is about a patient.
And at the end of the book I go back to families of those
patients I have lost and ask them what decisions would you

(01:06:04):
have changed now that you have luxury of time and this
perspective you have developed that, oh, I shouldn't have done
this or done that. And no other book I ever saw has
done this. And the weirdest thing is that
every family member has come outsaying they wouldn't have
changed any decision because they didn't have any other
choice, because to say don't treat would have been taken away

(01:06:29):
even those last glimmers of hopeand would have accelerated their
departure, perhaps their belovedone's departures.
And how could the mother of a 22year old Andrew or 38 year old
woman, or even me, Harvey's wife?
How would I decide these things?You want the loved one to be
there forever. The only thing people complain

(01:06:51):
about was patients, families 10 years later are complaining
about is the doctor's attitudes.For Andrew, the doctor was just
one floor up. For the last three months that
Andrew was admitted to the hospital.
That doctor never descended 1 staircase to come and say hello
to him. When Andrew waited every day for

(01:07:13):
him, they would send teams of Hospice care, teams of
palliative, teams of pain management, and even a team
handing him this form to sign. Think of that, that that is the
inhumanity that has come into everything, and that is what
changed my perceptions forever after being on the other side of

(01:07:35):
the bed, standing on both sides simultaneously.
Those are experiences I don't wish upon my enemy, but it
taught me something. Yeah, I think, yeah, I think
firstly, thank you for sharing those personal stories as well.
I know it takes a lot to do to share that.
It obviously brings a lot of emotion out of here as well.

(01:07:56):
But yeah, as, as we just touchedon that, all problems go away
and one problem becomes so magnified to a point where it
fundamentally changes where you are when that problem is gone.
Because it was the years after that were more were actually
quite hard and difficult to dealwith as well.
If not for your love for the books and doing those things
that you love, it would be very difficult for anyone to get back

(01:08:18):
from that. And it's, it's, and I think all
of this reflects the deeper problems within medicine, Cancer
Research, doctors as a problem us, the way we follow the
guidelines, go through algorithms, forget that we're
there for the patient first. I mean, there's AI mean
Hippocrates. A lot of people back then, we
knew there's certain things veryimportant.

(01:08:38):
I mean, one of the smaller things like I think it was
Hippocrates who says eat thy food as thy medicine or one day
you'll eat thy medicine as thy food.
Just small things like that. Just those small things where
you just shift, shift your thinking a little bit, change
the perspective, change the lensyou view the world and
fundamentally changed the medical field.

(01:08:59):
And with that, Azra, I mean, as a closing, maybe can you tell me
if we started with this, but maybe we can also end with it.
Your ideal world of healthcare, Cancer Research and just this
field as a whole. Maybe wonder we could dissect
certain papers in more a detail,but for now is a nice round of
how would you see the future of medicine?
Let's think of the thousands of doctors coming up.

(01:09:21):
How would you like them to treatpatients with cancer and what
would you like to see in the future?
Well, my closing statement wouldbe that everything we've been
doing in cancer is wrong. We need to think very
differently. Everything we're doing in
research is wrong. Yes, there are successes, but
they don't justify the number oflives we have hurt and the

(01:09:41):
number of resources, both financial and intellectual, we
have wasted over the years. So people keep saying, well, we
have car T, we have treatment for this, but that's too few
compared to. So going forward, I think we
need to shift our focus from thelast cell to the first cell in
all of healthcare. We need to go for early

(01:10:03):
detection and prevention and revolutionize ways of ways of
early detection. We, we have amazing technology,
We need to apply it at the rightend of the field, not the wrong
end, or it will become more and more dangerous and worse.
So I feel that the last thing, of course, is that it's, it's

(01:10:25):
what, what is so beautifully said.
Surgeons must be very careful when they test their knives, for
underneath their fine incisions rests the culprit life.
The problem is not that there's a wart you can't cut off, but
what lies underneath is real life.
That life does come with warts and pain and suffering.

(01:10:48):
And they will. There is no end to it.
You're not going to get rid of it by early detection and
prevention. There'll be other kinds of
suffering. So humanity must be taken as a
complex thing. Life must be given its full,
complex colors. It's, it's literally just as you

(01:11:08):
said, changing your thinking in a way where the human becomes
the center of things and love becomes the driving force and
love for the human, love for preventing their suffering,
their anguish becomes the movingengine of your life.
I think that is what I'd like toleave everyone with.
And I think your message is verybeautiful and and should be well

(01:11:31):
received. And I hope that people leave
this episode thinking about this, taking this seriously and
even looking into Cancer Research and looking into this
field with a different set of eyes.
No, I want them to look into theStenton and then please come up
and help me because go to my website, asraraza.com and you
can find all kinds of details there.

(01:11:52):
And the more people that help me, the faster I can get into
patients and all of humanity is going to benefit from it.
I seriously mean it. This is not some abstraction or
pie in the sky. This is all real.
This is being done by the finestscientists in the world.
So unless you are not a believerin science, you need to step up

(01:12:14):
and support the people doing theright things.
And I'll put links to all of those, Azra, and you can send me
any further ones that you'd likeme to put up on as well.
Thank you so much Azra, for the for your time, for your
incredible work and for being sothe activist you are within this
field. Thank you because you are the
one who have come up with the you came up with the most

(01:12:36):
thoughtful, provocative, interesting questions.
You weren't afraid to ask me about any, whether anything in
my life, whether it's deeply personal or highly contentious,
professionally speaking, you asked it and you really have the
full spectrum of the human patient to the most cutting edge
signs. So congratulations, at such a

(01:12:58):
young age, you have incisive thinking and you are interested
in new ideas. I really am very grateful to be
on your podcast because the people listening to you must
also be of the same caliber if they're listening to you.
So thank you very much.