A Stanford Cancer Scientist on What Actually Prevents Cancer (And What Wellness Headlines Get Wrong)

Cancer research is not a national good. Cancer research belongs to everybody and matters to everybody. I think if you sit there and ask in a room of people, has your life been affected by cancer? Every hand in the room is going to go up. It matters a lot. Am I optimistic? I am so optimistic about the science. Cancer pulled a trick. It hijacked an ancient system to allow rapid genome change.

And

that's why cancer has become resistant to our treatments so quickly. People with a diagnosis of quote terminal cancer are living with cancer. Now that is an extraordinary statement and it speaks to the value and the importance of cancer research. People live with it. The most disturbing myth is one that's never specifically stated, but which has an undercurrent, which is if you get cancer, it's your fault. It really bothers me.

I think on the flip side of that as well, that you could do everything right. That's

right.

And you had no guarantee. If you had any amount of funding, unlimited resources, support, the tools and technologies, what would you like to study? What would you like to solve that hasn't yet been solved?

How do you develop more effective treatments for people whose cancers have extra chromosomal DNA? That's priority number one because that probably affects close to 4 million people a year. And people whose cancers have extra chromosomal DNA do worse than all other cancer patients. Exercise reduces cancer risk of many different cancer types. One of the best tools you can have to reduce your risk of cancer is literally sitting with you. You have agency in these matters. Do it.

Cancer is something that touches all of us. If it hasn't affected you directly, it's almost certainly affected someone that you love. Now, despite decades of research, trillions of dollars invested and some really extraordinary scientific progress, it still remains one of the most complex and feared diseases we face. But what if part of the challenge is that we've been looking at cancer through the wrong lens? What if cancer isn't a single disease at all, but an evolving system, one that adapts, changes and outmaneuvers us in real time? Now, today's guest is one of those scientists that's helping to fundamentally reshape how we understand that system. Dr. Paul Michel is a physician scientist, a professor of pathology at Stanford University, and is considered one of the world's leading cancer researchers. His work has led to one of the most important discoveries in modern oncology, that in many aggressive cancers, the genes driving the tumor growth can actually escape chromosomes entirely, existing as these free-floating circular DNA that allow tumors to evolve at an extraordinary speed. Now, this is a discovery that helps to explain why some cancers are so aggressive, why they become so resistant to treatment, and why despite everything we know, they can still outpace us. Now, whilst we unpack the science here and tell you what to do about it, we also talk about the deeply human side of cancer, what drives someone to dedicate their life to it, what it means to live with the diagnosis and how we begin to shift from a mindset of eradication to one of understanding,