Dr. Harold Varmus, Director of the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Varmus won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1989 for discovering the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes. Dr. Doug Schwartzentruber, Surgical Oncologist and Medical Director at IU Health Goshen Center for Cancer Care. Time magazine ranked Dr. Schwartzentruber as one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2010. Dr. Deborah Schrag, Medical Oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Dr. Schrag is also an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Lewis Cantley, Professor of cell biology at Harvard Medical School. His discovery and study of the enzyme PI-3-kinase have proved highly influential for cancer research. This panel was moderated by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University. Dr. Mukherjee is the author of "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer," which was nominated as a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.
All of the videos released in Breakthroughs: Cancer are available for media outlets, cancer organizations, and the public-at-large to embed around the web, but Big Think kindly requests that anyone re-publishing the videos provide a link back to the remainder of the series at http:bigthink/series65
The views expressed here are solely those of the participants, and do not represent the views of Big Think or its sponsors. Big Think is a global knowledge forum that showcases the cutting-edge ideas of leading experts across variety of fields. Big Think has interviewed over 1,500 thought leaders, including economists Paul Krugman and Muhammad Yunas, futurist Ray Kurzweil, biologists Rickard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson, Paul Nurse and Anthony Fauci, filmmaker Ken Burns, novelists John Irving and Paul Auster, business leaders Azim Premji and Richard Branson, investors Peter Thiel and George Soros, journalists Arianna Huffington and David Remnick, US Poet Laureates Billy Collins and Rita Dove, US senators John McCain and the late Ted Kennedy, particle physicists Freeman Dyson and Michio Kaku, and artists Chuck Close and Jules Feiffer. For more information regarding Big Think or its Breakthroughs series, please contact Andrew Dermont at andrewdermontbigthink or 212-242-0617.