Siddhartha Mukherjee

I mean, I do love the fourth wing.

But I will say one of the books that I think really changed my professional kind of thinking and how to think about is The Emperor of All Maladies by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, who is, I mean, he is, the book is incredible.

I just actually reread it.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, I want to talk about that.

Yes, so Manas AI with Ujwal Singh and Siddhartha Mukherjee.

You know, there's not just that.

I think there's a lot of different kind of AI applications.

Or the other one is chemo,

right?

There's also CAR-T therapy and a few other things that Siddhartha Mukherjee even, but it's a very difficult path.

If you can just target just the cancer and you can get the binder right, then you can actually cure that cancer.

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My guest this week is Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, a returning guest to The Drive.

Sid is a physician, oncologist, researcher, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies, as well as other books, The Gene and The Song of the Cell.

I wanted to have Sid back on because, frankly, there are few people who can move as easily between the molecular details of a disease and the much bigger questions of why we age and what we might be able to do about it.

Forgive me.

The Emperor... of all maladies is by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Sorry.

I don't know why I didn't have that written down.

Yeah

... with, uh, uh, Ujjwal Singh and Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Um, you know, there's not just that.

I think there's a lot of different kind of AI applications- For example, Codex is better at some coding tasks than Claude Code, but Claude Code is trained on less compute than Codex, but still has some features that it's much better on because it, it, it does the application better, right? And so how that application of useful production of high-quality tokens works, and you can think about that in frankly every form of information work, right? And you know, there's companies like Sierra and Parloa, which are doing the customer service side.

Or the other one is chemo.

Right.

Right? There's also CAR T therapy and a few other things that Siddhartha Mukherjee even...

But it's a very difficult path.

Let's start at the cellular level.

Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies is a 700-page biography of cancer

cancerHe breaks down the terrifying mechanics of how a single cell forgets how to die, tracing the history of oncology from mustard gas in World War I to modern treatments

And when we talk about the medical, Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is essential

Mm-hmm.

So, you know, Atul Gawande or Siddhartha Mukherjee or, or Michael-

Oh, wow

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