Azra Raza, M.D.: Why we're losing the war on cancer

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode. My guest this week is Dr. Azra Raza. Dr. Raza is a professor of medicine and the director of the MDS Center at Columbia University in New York. She is a practicing oncologist and a cancer researcher who has been published in over 300 peer review manuscripts. She grew up and attended medical school in Pakistan before moving to the United States for her clinical training, which we discussed briefly.
She's an expert in myelodysplastic syndrome, which is a form of pre-leukemia and acute myeloid leukemia, AML. She's a recipient of a number of awards, including the 2012 Hope Award in Cancer Research, which she shared with Nobel laureate, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn. Dr. Raza is an outspoken advocate for completely reconfiguring the current model of research in cancer. And the purpose of this discussion is really to dive into her beautiful book, The First Cell, which really is a completely critical look at how medical research is using the wrong types of models. My words, not hers, the ROI on spending is completely out of line with what anybody would consider reasonable if they were to consider it from an objective lens.
And frankly, we end with what I think is a very thoughtful discussion around what the way forward looks like. Because you could easily get through this. And I always love to speak with a person a little bit before and a little bit after. And at the end, she said, you know, gosh, I really, I hope we didn't get too much onto a down note. And I said, no, I don't think we did. I think that there's enough sort of hype around cancer research that it's okay to lift the sheets a little bit and show this side of things. A couple of things I'd say about this episode. First of all, Azra goes out of her way, both in the book and if you hear her in other interviews to say, look, this is not someone who considers herself a writer. This is a person who considers herself both a physician and a scientist and in many ways wrote this book because she just really needed to talk about this stuff. To which I would say, one, it's very beautifully written, but two, I was blown away at the literary sprinklings that made their way into this. I mean, and you have to remember, we're doing this by Zoom basically or a comparable platform. So we can look at each other on video and just as sure as I'm looking at another person across from the table, I would ask her a question and she would respond by quoting, Emily Dickinson, in not just quoted like I've memorized this, but quoted in the most lyrical way. So I think if you're a fan of literature, science, you have an interest in oncology, there are a lot of things you'll get out of this episode. So I'll leave it at that. And I hope that you do enjoy my conversation with Dr. Azra Raza.
Azra, thank you so much for not just making time to be here today, but as you told me before, we started setting aside a lot of time. It's an honor to sit with you. I've known a little bit about you before your book was published because one of my colleagues knew about you and said, hey, this is an amazing woman who's in the process of writing an amazing book and you're definitely going to want to not only read it, but more importantly, I think speak with her and be able to interview her and talk more broadly about this subject matter. And it's hard to believe that that was probably a year ago, if not more.
You're an oncologist by training and I've seen a couple of your short interviews, though I've gone out of my way to not listen to you on previous podcasts who has not color how I want to talk with you.
But the two times I've seen you on very short clips on YouTube, you've made it very clear that you were not a writer, which I find ironic given how well you write.