303 | James P. Allison on Fighting Cancer with the Immune System

303 | James P. Allison on Fighting Cancer with the Immune System

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.

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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.

Jaksot(415)

333 | Gordon Pennycook on Unthinkingness, Conspiracies, and What to Do About Them

333 | Gordon Pennycook on Unthinkingness, Conspiracies, and What to Do About Them

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332 | Dmitri Tymoczko on the Mathematics Behind Music

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AMA | October 2025

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331 | Solo: Fine-Tuning, God, and the Multiverse

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Certain features of our universe seem unnatural to us. These include "constants of nature" such as the cosmological constant and the mass of the Higgs boson, as well as features of the initial conditi...

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330 | Petter Törnberg on the Dynamics of (Mis)Information

330 | Petter Törnberg on the Dynamics of (Mis)Information

A characteristic of complex systems is that individual components combine to exhibit large-scale emergent behavior even when the components were not specifically designed for any particular purpose wi...

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329 | Steven Pinker on Rationality and Common Knowledge

329 | Steven Pinker on Rationality and Common Knowledge

Getting along in society requires that we mostly adhere to certainly shared norms and customs. Often it's not enough that we all know what the rules are, but also that everyone else knows the rules, a...

22 Syys 20251h 16min

328 | Mary Roach on Replacing Parts of Our Bodies

328 | Mary Roach on Replacing Parts of Our Bodies

Like any machine, bodies occasionally break down, and it's natural to go in search of a replacement part. Ancient societies featured simple prosthetics for teeth, noses, and limbs, while modern medici...

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AMA | September 2025

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Welcome to the September 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by P...

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