Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D., Ph.D.: new frontiers in cancer therapy, medicine, and the writing process

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Hey, everybody, welcome to this week's episode of The Drive. My guest this week is Siddhartha Mukherjee, who is a remarkable writer, in fact, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, and a remarkable physician and scientist. In fact, probably there's nobody I know that combines those three things as efficaciously as Siddhartha does.
His biography reads like I'm making it up. He studied biology at Stanford.
He then became a Rhodes Scholar, went to Oxford, earned his PhD in immunology, returned to the United States to earn his MD at Harvard, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Fast forward to today. He is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology at Columbia University, which is where we met to do this interview. He has published also and continues to publish consistently in both The New Yorker and The New York Times, which in and of itself is quite a distinction, as I would learn. Typically one is on either side of those, but not both. And of course, he's published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, in addition to a whole host of other medical journals.
I met Sid probably five years ago at a dinner that was set up by Lou Cantley, someone I'll be interviewing very shortly, who will be a guest obviously soon. And while I remember that dinner very well, I was surprised to learn that it left such an impression on Sid and he described it as something to the effect of one of the most interesting and perhaps important scientific collaborations in his life that stemmed from it.
As we kind of jotted out a napkin experiment that went on to become a paper that was published by a group led by Lou and Sid. And that paper was published this past summer and we talk about that in detail. That paper involved the use of ketogenic diets in combination with a class of drugs called PI3 kinase inhibitors. We're gonna go into great detail on that so I obviously don't wanna repeat any of that stuff here, but I think for those of you that are interested in cancer, you're obviously gonna find this episode very interesting. But the other thing with Sid is it doesn't matter if you have no interest in cancer. I think you'll find this discussion interesting because Sid has a way of making everything interesting and that to me is part of Sid's gift. When I got his book The Gene in the summer of 2016 when it came out, it's one of probably only six books in my life that I was not able to stop reading from the moment I started. So it was one of those things where everything else I was doing had to be put aside for a few days until I could finish that book. That's just the way Sid writes and that's also the way he speaks. He is a unique human being and I think that will come across in this interview. The other thing that was a total pleasant surprise to me was in doing the research for this podcast was coming across a book that I was ashamed to admit I didn't even know he'd written called The Laws of Medicine or let's believe it's called The Three Laws of Medicine. And we talk about these three laws and rather than even stating them now, I just think it's worth, this podcast is worth the price of admission just on the basis of understanding those three laws.
So with that, I hope you will welcome Sid to the show. And I do want to just remind folks to please sign up for the email list. I've been putting a lot of effort into those emails every Sunday morning they go out and I hope that they're at least worth some value. I think they are and I like to be able to kind of share things with folks that I'm reading or seeing along the way and they don't always have to do with longevity. Keep in mind, one of the things that I think takes up more actual time than anything else with respect to this podcast is putting together the show notes. So Bob and Travis work really hard on those and the feedback we've been getting is incredible. People keep saying, my God, how do you make these things? And the short answer is, I don't. I don't do any of it. But Bob and Travis do, especially Travis. And I think that if you spend a few minutes looking at that stuff, especially if you find some of the content challenging, and when we get into technical terms, which we do on some of the podcasts, you're pretty much gonna find everything in the show notes. Lastly, if you're enjoying this, it would be an honor if you would head on over to Apple Podcast Reviews and leave us a review, especially if it's a positive one. But we'll take a negative one too, as long as you can be constructive in your feedback. So without further delay, here is my guest today, Sid Mukherjee. Hey Sid, thanks for making time.