Curing Cancer, with 2018 Nobel Laureate Jim Allison

Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice answer fan-submitted Cosmic Queries on cancer research with freshly-minted 2018 Nobel laureate and immunologist Dr. Jim Allison, who’s at the frontier of finding new cancer immunotherapy treatments. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/curing-cancer-with-2018-nobel-laureate-jim-allison/ Photo Credit: BruceBlaus [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and I've got with me co-host Chuck Nice.

• 0:28Chuck Nice?

  Hey Neil.

• 0:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Always good to have you Chuck.

• 0:30Chuck Nice?

  Always good to be here.

• 0:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh wait tweeting at ChuckNiceComic.

• 0:32Chuck Nice?

  Thank you sir, yes I am.

• 0:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, he never says my Twitter handle. I gotta say his Twitter, he never says, "That's fine, fine."

• 0:39Chuck Nice?

  You know.

• 0:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dip, dip, dip, dip, dip.

• 0:41Chuck Nice?

  I'm just saying, I don't think you have to say it when the person has like 100 million people on Twitter. Like, you know, we have 12 million Twitter followers, then, you know.

• 0:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's 13 million, but that's fine.

• 0:50Chuck Nice?

  No worries.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is a special edition, I think of it as a special edition, of Cosmic Queries. It's a special edition because we have with us, someone who is not only the world's expert on this topic, he might be the greatest expert in the universe on this topic. And it's the topic of curing cancer.

• 1:09Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 1:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:10Chuck Nice?

  It's a big topic.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a big topic, it's on everyone's mind, and our special guest to help answer these questions on curing cancer, because obviously I have no such expertise, is immunologist, Dr. Jim Allison. Jim, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Thank you very much.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so you're Skyping into us from where?

• 1:30Speaker 02

  From my office at the Cancer Center in Houston.

• 1:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Cancer Center in Houston, huge medical complex there if I, if I, if memory serves. And you, like, were just, like, minutes ago, awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, and you're professor and chair at the Department of Immunology at the University of Texas, at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Did I get all those, all those titles correct?

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's correct.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, excellent, excellent.

• 1:58Chuck Nice?

  Very cool.

• 1:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, did they call you in the middle of the night and said you won the Nobel Prize, and then you hung up because you thought it was a prank call?

• 2:04Chuck Nice?

  Because that's how it happened for me.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  No, actually, there's been some buzz the last couple of years and, you know, and my wife says, well, phone, you know, we wake up, look at the clock, say, well, the phone didn't ring. So this next year, okay, this year I got up and she said, the phone, I guess next year, you know, phone didn't ring, I guess we'll get it next year. Then the phone rang at that instant. It was my son saying, I just saw on TV that you won the Nobel Prize. And I said, really, what? You know, and then I looked at my phone buzzed and there was a call from Sweden on it, basically. So my son beat him.

• 2:50Chuck Nice?

  You found out like through the news, basically, not from the actual Nobel committee, but through the news.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know what it was. They didn't have my right phone number or something. I don't know. But, but, you know.

• 3:02Chuck Nice?

  See, see, I've never gotten a Nobel Prize because my phone number is unlisted.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  They better fix that.

• 3:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So again, thanks for, I know you must be swamped with media inquiries and, and the likes. I'm delighted that you gave this program this, this hour of your time. So thanks for that. So if you could just lead off by telling us, what is it that you were recognized for doing?

• 3:32Speaker 02

  I was recognized for developing a way to get the immune system to attack cancer cells, which is something that, you know, people have been doing for a long time. And it's potentially curative in many kinds of cancer.

• 3:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So instead of attacking the tumor, which would be the natural first thought, right? Because, oh, that's bad. Let's get rid of it. Let's attack it. You, you came in the back door.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. What we, what I did was for about three decades, I've been involved in trying to understand how these cells called T cells, they're kind of the warriors of the immune system. They go all over your body looking for a virus infected cell or a tumor or something. And then they deal with it. And they say, usually by killing it. But anyway, we know they could attack, we know they can recognize tumor cells, but getting them to it effectively wasn't. Easy and a lot of trials failed to try to, you know, arm them to go attack the cancer or get them attacked, but I, but I found a molecule, it's called C T L A four, it doesn't matter what it stands for, but it's, it's a molecule that's sort of the brakes on the immune system that after T cells get going, they use this as a negative regulator, turn

• 4:43Speaker 02

  themselves off so they don't hurt you by just continuing to divide, divide, divide, fill you all up with a particular kind of T cell. And so I had the idea that maybe normally that molecule, the brakes were coming on too early and stopping the T cells from eliminating the cancer. And so I thought, well, let's just disable the brakes temporarily. And sure enough, it works. But just, just for the reason you said, a lot of people had real trouble with it. Cause they said, you know, how can you treat cancer by ignoring the cancer? You know, you're not even treating the cancer, you're treating the immune system.

• 5:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I love the way, I love, I love the way you started your answer. You said, I found a molecule.

• 5:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 5:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That happens to you all the time, Jack.

• 5:25Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  It's a little smaller, it's a little smaller than what you look at.

• 5:28Chuck Nice?

  So when we see these commercials on television that say, uh, this is not a video game and this is not a screensaver, this is an actual cancer cell being attacked by your own immune system. Is that your research that they're referring to?

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:50Chuck Nice?

  Wow. That is really impressive.

• 5:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, now you're only impressed because it was in a commercial?

• 5:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, cause anybody.

• 5:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The dude just won a Nobel Prize.

• 5:58Chuck Nice?

  Anybody can win a Nobel Prize, but not everybody can get a commercial on TV.

• 6:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's true. That's very true.

• 6:08Chuck Nice?

  I'm interested because I, I'm, I'm familiar with your work because, uh, my mother was lost to cancer last year, about a week ago last year. I lost my mom to cancer. Um, bone cancer. And so, uh, but the immunotherapy was a little too, she was too advanced and too old, they said. Um, so what are the cancers where your discoveries are most effective?

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Well, up to now, the most effective one has been melanoma, about twenty metastatic melanoma, which when we started working on this, there was no approved treatment. And there'd been no drug that had ever improved survival in a randomized trial. By what I mean is there was no successful treatment. And so that was where the trials with my drug started. Well, they started mice. One of the things that was lucky, it worked against all kinds of cancer. But we started in melanoma. And what we know now, and it was approved by the FDA in 2011 after a lot of trials. But what we know now, actually, about two years ago, there was enough data to have 10

• 7:23Speaker 02

  years follow-up data on 5,000 people who'd been treated. And 20-something percent, a little over 20% are alive 10 years after a single round of treatment. And so when you add a second drug to it, a drug that was subsequently discovered by Hanjo and his group, who shares the project, that that response rate goes up to 60%.

• 7:46Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  But so that's the highest. And there's no reason to think that those patients won't be around for 10 years as well. We have to wait and see. We don't know yet, but you know, I'm hopeful. But it also has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for lung cancer, kidney cancer, bladder cancer, Hodgkin's lymphoma, Merkel cell cancer, head and neck cancer, a few others. There's 15 indications it's been approved for. And with varying response rates from 15 to 50%. And so it's all in place of that. That means that the fact they're approved means any doctor, of course, could prescribe them.

• 8:25Chuck Nice?

  I just heard you say head and neck cancer, which I've never heard of until this moment. And that's not brain and throat. That's actually head and neck.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  No, it's from either smoking or human papillomavirus.

• 8:37Chuck Nice?

  Ah.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  People that chew tobacco or smoke cigars, you know, get that a lot.

• 8:43Chuck Nice?

  Okay, okay.

• 8:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I, another quick question just before we go to our fan base. And because that, they're the ones that supplied the foundation of questions that is going to make this show. Procedurally, if you can demonstrate that something you're working on cures cancer in mice or rats, do you have to have human trials for it to still be approved by the FDA?

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. When I started on this, a lot of people said to me, well, anybody could cure cancer in mice.

• 9:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wow. That's funny. Oh, my gosh.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:17Chuck Nice?

  Doctor, by the way, doctor, just so that you know, doctor, we call those haters.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Oh, those people need a little education. But, uh, but yeah, you have to have the trials to prove it's safe and, you know, do advocacy.

• 9:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but what, uh, it's something that was revealed in, uh, what's that movie? That Dallas Buyers Club. In the Dallas Buyers Club, the FDA was like the enemy. And then in the end, they said the FDA loosened some rules to get a drug into use even before trials are fully completed. Because if I'm about to die to say, oh, this might not be, this drug might not be safe for you, but it could cure me entirely, the efficacy of that feels wrong.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a complicated subject. I mean, my brother, uh, had metastatic prostate cancer and, uh, while we were developing this drug and, and I really wanted to get it to him, but I just couldn't. But the reason is that, you know, the companies that are helped develop, we, I couldn't develop it by myself. I had to team up with a biotech company to actually make the drug itself. And then they had to get approved, do these trials. But, you know, they could only make so much. And if they tried on people outside of a trial and, and hurt them or, or kill them, then that's, that ruins the, the drug, you know, so.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  The risk of, you know, slowing it down, they insist on in these trials. I think what they've done though, especially since the issues you're talking about. They've become a lot faster now. So in this class of drugs, they've, they've really greased the rails on it now where uh, there's enough experience where you know, if you show the efficacy, that's good enough.

• 11:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Cause they know now about the safety.

• 11:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, excellent.

• 11:14Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, let's go to our fanbase.

• 11:16Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 11:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And who do you have?

• 11:17Chuck Nice?

  Kyle Ryan Toth uh, from Patreon says this, along with our search for curing cancer once it forms, are we researching ways to prevent cancer from even developing?

• 11:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the first place.

• 11:30Chuck Nice?

  Uh, yes, and um, that, that's, that's a great question, by the way.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've, we're, we're working on that. Actually, there's some, some vaccines for HPV-induced cervical cancer, for example, that just a word of wisdom, I think all teenage kids, male and female, need to get that vaccine before they become sexually active. Cause we can completely prevent that disease. Now, the normal kinds of cancer that we're talking about here, you know, like melanoma and stuff like that, it's just, it's so hard to predict who's gonna respond and, and uh, you know, what the targets are. The, the immune system just attacks unique stuff and almost every case it's different. There are some hereditary cancers though, that you might be able to, to vaccinate.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  People are really giving that a lot of serious consideration now that already have some lesions that may predispose them and then we can take care of that.

• 12:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jim, is it, is it that the um, we have one word to describe all of these kinds of cancers, so we think of them as one monolithic target to attack, but maybe we need different words for them all so that we can think of them uh, as things that would respond to their own unique solutions?

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, it used to be, it was cancer and then when we realized there were, we, I'm speaking for the whole field, people realized that, you know, there's skin cancers, breast cancers, you know, colon cancers, they were named after the, the tissue that they came from. Then the next step was when people that were studying the cancer biology realized that the mutations that caused them were very different and then they sort of, they all were differentiated by what causative gene mutation was that gave rise to them. If you classify them that way, there's several hundred kinds of cancers.

• 13:22Chuck Nice?

  Right, there is, okay. So that is the trend line, yeah.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, but when we look at them now, it's sort of, we're broadening it again. I just look at cancer to see to be immunogenic, meaning they provoke a autoimmune response, so they don't.

• 13:34Chuck Nice?

  Mm, okay, right.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  Instead of any individual type of cancer.

• 13:39Chuck Nice?

  And just very quickly before we move on, because we're almost out of time for this segment, but you mentioned something in a cursory fashion that I think is very important, and I just caught the way you phrased it, every teenager might want to look into HPV. Now, is that including men? Because, you know, when you're a guy, and you're 18, and you hear cervical cancer, you're like, "I'm good. I'm okay. I don't have to worry about that."

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, he may be good, but the women that you encounter may not be good later on, because men are asymptomatic. You get it, and you pass it, but you never know you had it. And so, you know, men need to get it as well.

• 14:19Chuck Nice?

  There you go. So that was my point, is that this is something that affects everyone. And the vaccine, we know it leads to the direct prevention of cervical cancer in women because it fights the virus that causes it in women, correct?

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Exactly. The immune system destroys the virus before it could do anything.

• 14:39Chuck Nice?

  Fantastic, man. Wow.

• 14:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay. All right, we gotta take our first break. You're listening to a special Cosmic Queries edition, where we are privileged and honored to have the freshly minted Nobel Laureate.

• 14:54Chuck Nice?

  Wow. That sounds so cool, man. Freshly minted Nobel Laureate, man.

• 14:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Freshly minted, right.

• 15:00Chuck Nice?

  They just made you, doctor.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Let me take a stamp, maybe?

• 15:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stamp of Dr. Jim Allison from University of Texas Medical Center in Houston, Louisiana.

• 15:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. We have with us Dr. Jim Allison, freshly minted Nobel Laureate.

• 15:24Chuck Nice?

  Sweet.

• 15:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he took time out of what we know is an oversubscribed day of his to just share with us his insights on what cancer is and how it works and how we're trying to fight it. And it's Cosmic Queries, so keep it going.

• 15:40Chuck Nice?

  Here's the next question. This is from a friend. "Hey Doc, what are you gonna do with all that money?"

• 15:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  First, you realize he's gotta split that three ways. You realize this.

• 15:53Chuck Nice?

  Oh, what? That's not right.

• 15:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So whatever the total money is, he gets a fraction of it.

• 15:59Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 15:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, let's start there.

• 16:00Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Jim, what are you gonna do with the money?

• 16:02Speaker 02

  There's just one other. It's just two ways.

• 16:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, just two ways?

• 16:05Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 16:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two ways?

• 16:06Speaker 02

  Well, the government, the government's the third one, I guess.

• 16:11Chuck Nice?

  Wait a minute, are you telling me that they tax you on your Nobel Prize?

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 16:16Chuck Nice?

  That is disgraceful, sir. Disgraceful.

• 16:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so he gets half the prize and then the government gets like the other half.

• 16:23Chuck Nice?

  The other half.

• 16:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A half and his half. Okay, so what are you gonna do with the $40.89 that you have left?

• 16:29Speaker 02

  I'm gonna probably give it to, give a lot of it to some, you know, cancer research organizations and I think I need a new suit.

• 16:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will let you do that, sir.

• 16:42Chuck Nice?

  He wasn't even serious about the, I was jerking around. This was great to actually learn all of this stuff about the Nobel Prize money.

• 16:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 16:51Chuck Nice?

  All right, let's go to a real question. As a matter of fact, this should have been the first question before our Patreon, and this is from Nyron Reich on Instagram who says, "What is cancer?" It means, you know, a lot of people may not know exactly what cancer is.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  Well, I'm not sure we still know exactly what cancer is, but a lot of people have referred to it as sort of a social disease, you know, complex organisms with lots of different kinds of cells and they've got to play nicely with each other, you know, to grow organs to a certain size and then stop and then be able to heal wounds, but then stop when they're down where they're put and not go someplace else. And so cancer is just, uh, is sort of, one description is hyperplasia, meaning it starts growing too fast and doesn't stop. But that's basically, it's just cells losing the normal controls that make them cooperate with all the other cells to make you what you are.

• 17:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And these are your cells. They're not some exterior, uh, alien, not alien in a cosmic sense, but just

• 18:01Chuck Nice?

  Foreign.

• 18:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Foreign, foreign. It's not just some foreign thing in your body that you could just remove and all is well. Your body is misbehaving. Is that a fair way to characterize it?

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, the cells in your body, some of the cells in your body are misbehaving and causing damage to the cells around them. Some cases just by getting too big, but in other cases by actually invading and destroying tissues.

• 18:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  So.

• 18:26Chuck Nice?

  Cool. All right. All right. Let's move on to Renee Douglas from Pittsburgh and she wants to know this. If a cure is found, would it cure all cancers or are there different types of cancers and would each one need a different cure? And just as a follow-up, is there a means of achieving a universal cure is probably the easier way to put it.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, excellent question. It used to be that there was, there were what were called personalized therapies for each patient and you try to figure out where the mutation was that was causing the cell to be a cancer cell. And those turned out not to be significant.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Curing cancer because there's so many mutations in a lot of cancer cells is that there is not just one, you know, you cure, you kill all the cells, you got one mutation, there's ones with others, drug doesn't work anymore, we have to keep changing it. But one of the beauties of letting the immune system go is, and unleashing it to the T cells to attack tumors is they can recognize, you know, many, many of the mutations, so they become a multi, you know, bigger army that could hit a lot more targets. And since it's not directed against any specific thing, you know, one of the ideas when I thought of this in the mid 90s, I thought, well, this could be a way of treating all cancers.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  And, you know, that has not been realized, you know, there are limitations that have to do with just the number of mutations and other properties of individual cancers. I mean, some like lung cancer, melanoma, bladder, kidney, these can be cured, you know, in a fraction of patients, these can be cured now. But we, and we know from melanoma where there's the most experience, that over 20% of people are alive 10 years after a single treatment. And that's maybe going up to about 60%. But other ones like glioblastoma, which is what, you know, Cindy McCain died of, we just haven't made much progress there.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  And we're, you know, we're working, my wife, Dr. Padmali Sharma, who's a physician and physician scientist, I'm a scientist, but we're working together in a group called the Immunotherapy Platform here at MD Anderson. And our whole goal is to get cancer cells just from patients, get the tumors, and see what's going on in there, you know, what kind of T cells are there, what kind of immune cells are in there, and what's going on in individual kinds of cancers, so that we could figure out how to make combinations that'll treat, you know, as many cancers as we can. So I think we're going to eliminate a large fraction of many kinds of cancers, but I don't think, I don't think I could say, see a world where there is no cancer.

• 21:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you just created a cancer bank? Is that, did I characterize that correctly?

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Basically, yes. We store specimens, but we also study the fresh out of patients as well.

• 21:25Chuck Nice?

  That's cool. That is one bank I never want to bank with. The cancer bank, I'm just saying. I, yeah, I'm happy with my money at Chase.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Well, we'll take things out of that bag, hopefully do some good with it.

• 21:41Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 21:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What else you have?

• 21:44Chuck Nice?

  Let's go to Ari Maoudi, or Ari, Ari Modi, who says this. Could cancer be cured through any of the breakthroughs achieved from CRISPR? The gene editing, and I'll, I'll just follow that with, was that instrumental in any way in your research, CRISPR and gene editing?

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Uh, no, it wasn't.

• 22:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's the answer, no. Next question.

• 22:08Chuck Nice?

  And there you go, Ari.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  As far as it's promised, you know, a lot of people are thinking about it. The problem is, you know, if you can get rid of those genes that are causing the cancer using CRISPR, turn them back to normal.

• 22:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Problem is, it's kind of hard to figure out how to do that because you'd have to do, there are many of them, but you'd have to do them all one at a time. But if you can figure out a way to, and people are working on this to, you know, change a whole bunch of genes at once, that might, that might work. So there's, you know, a lot of, it's not here yet, but I wouldn't rule it out.

• 22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, so you're not ruling out the, the notion that it could be, you have to snip out a piece of gene that would be causing cancer, whether or not CRISPR is the actual means by which that would happen?

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 22:49Chuck Nice?

  Okay, cool. That's excellent, excellent, good stuff. David Bailey from Facebook wants to know this. There are a lot of claims out there about different superfoods and how they're able to, and, and he says cure, but that's, the claims that are made are not that they cure cancer. However, uh, example, uh, turmeric. Uh, but are there any scientifically validated foods or diets that can help a person who is battling cancer to aid their immune system in the fight? Thank you, David Bailey. What a polite question, David.

• 23:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a food question?

• 23:23Chuck Nice?

  Food question.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, people ask me that all the time, and I really can't give you any single answer except to say, do the things your mama told you when you were a kid, you know? Eat a well-rounded diet, don't smoke, you know, don't lay out in the sun, don't, you know, drink too much, do everything in moderation.

• 23:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wear your seatbelt.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  Exercise, all that stuff, just stay healthy as you can.

• 23:44Chuck Nice?

  Oh, good. Uh, you had a good mom. My mom used to tell me, you're gonna die! And, uh, you know, stay in the house! It's crazy out there, you're gonna die! So.

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I, I think, uh, Jim just said that I can stop eating kale. That's what he said. I think I heard him say that.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  You just need just a little bit of it.

• 24:07Chuck Nice?

  Right, in moderation.

• 24:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In moderation, okay.

• 24:08Chuck Nice?

  You just need a little bit of kale. Remember when kale was a garnish? What happened to our society? All right, here we go.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I can't stand kale.

• 24:19Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. Jeff Ferris from Facebook wants to know this. It's estimated about one-third of the people who get cancer are genetically predisposed to it. Where are we on the ability to do testing to predict the outcome? And how reliable is the current state of testing? Is having a genetic marker of 50% positive or 70% positive a good means of being able to tell?

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not sure it's as high as 30%. A significant number are, but breast cancers, for example, to some extent ovarian cancer in women can be caused by BRCA mutations. And so, uh...

• 24:58Chuck Nice?

  And by the way, doctor, just for all of those who are unlike me that know exactly what BRCA mutations are, what are, what are, what are those?

• 25:05Speaker 02

  The mutations that were first found, uh, to, to, just by studying backwards, that women with breast cancer had, very often had this gene. I don't even remember what it stands for, but anyway, this gene called BRCA, breast cancer, uh, I guess the BRCA stands for breast cancer, but, but, uh, we know now that it's involved in DNA, you know, keeping your genes normal, you know, and, and it's inherited. If a woman inherits one copy from her mom, then something happens to the other copy, then, you know, it could be dangerous. So, you know, it's, uh, something with that, people with breast cancer. But there's a lot of other kinds of cancer that it's not quite as definitive as that.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Prostate cancer, we know that if you have a brother that got it, you're about twice as likely to get it, but nobody's been able to put their finger on why that is yet, so.

• 25:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, on what part of the genetic, uh, of your genome is then responsible? So, so with the, with the BRCA, it's, correct me if I'm wrong, is that the first time you have such high level confidence that a person will get cancer that you, people are convinced to have preventative surgery?

• 26:16Speaker 02

  That, that's happening, yes.

• 26:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. And, but there's no other cancer prediction for which that is advised? Is that correct?

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Uh, not that I'm aware of.

• 26:26Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, okay. Uh, this is Denise Cunningham Troya. And she says, my five-year-old daughter, or granddaughter, was diagnosed in May with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, uh, P. Uh, since it is generated in the marrow, is there anything new on the horizon? So are you familiar with this particular cancer? And, and any research that it might be encouraging?

• 26:53Speaker 02

  I'm not, I'm certainly not an expert on that, that kind of disease. But I can tell you that there is, there is some activity in seeing if these, these, uh, checkpoint blockers, as we call them, uh, work in leukemias in adults. And, uh, they do in some cases. The, the work's early and only started a few years ago. But, uh, there's, there's some hesitation in, in using them in developing adolescents or younger kids because people are somewhat worried about immunological changes while your body's changing and everything. But I wouldn't be surprised if it gets there, uh, sooner or later.

• 27:30Chuck Nice?

  Cool. Well, that's encouraging. Hopefully, yeah. There you go. That's, uh, very cool.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  And there's another therapy called CAR T cell, which is an engineered kind of T cell that's put back into leukemia patients that might also have some promise. I don't think, it has been used in kids.

• 27:46Chuck Nice?

  All right. So two things to perhaps look forward to. And of course, we wish Denise and her granddaughter all the best. Uh, this is Cheryl Squeaker Carter. And she says, is there actually any scientific research being done on cannabis? And the effects it has on cancer?

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's quite a bit, but most of it's, you know, is, is giving to what we call palliative care to make patients more comfortable, less nauseous when they're getting chemotherapy. Um, I don't think there's any evidence that cannabis.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  You know, it could be used to treat cancer itself. And in fact, you know, if smoked, it has some of the same carcinogens that actually smoking tobacco has, but at much, much lower levels. So, so as far as I know, the only thing that's being useful, like I said, is just helping patients feel better.

• 28:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The carcinogenic components, does that, though they're much smaller, does it matter how you ingest the cannabis as, and what role it could then play in these cancer bits?

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's inhaled or if it's brown?

• 28:58Speaker 02

  It's gonna immediately go, you know, into your lungs and then ultimately into the bladder. If it's eaten, a lot of it gets, gets digested away. So I don't think, I don't think there's any data showing that it's, has caused cancer. I think, that it matters. I doubt if it would if it was just, you know, cookies or something.

• 29:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 29:22Chuck Nice?

  Hmm, okay.

• 29:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or brownies.

• 29:24Chuck Nice?

  Or brownies, exactly. Or any number of edibles, I'm just saying, you know. Very cool. I don't know why, but I feel a need to buy a ticket to Colorado.

• 29:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, time for one more question in this segment.

• 29:38Chuck Nice?

  Okay, here we go. This is Daniel Junius, or Junius, wants to know this. Is it plausible to kill cancer with cryosurgery?

• 29:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:49Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And we've done some experiments with that.

• 29:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, cryo is cold?

• 29:55Speaker 02

  Freezing, yeah. There's a probe, and it's done, it's done in the clinic a lot, particularly in kidney cancer and breast cancer. It's gotta be localized though, but what we, we showed in mice, that if you had two tumors on opposite sides of a mouse, you could cure one of them by freezing it, leave the other one alone, but injecting, you know, our drug. Just after you froze the first one, because that makes it fall apart and, you know, then primes the T cells will go over and kill the other one. So that's now in clinical trials in kidney cancer and breast cancer.

• 30:29Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 30:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That sounds like a military operation. We will conquer this side of the enemy.

• 30:34Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 30:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We deputize them and they become ours.

• 30:37Chuck Nice?

  Right. Our zombie army. We created a zombie army to go kill cancer. Super cool, man.

• 30:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa, whoa.

• 30:45Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 30:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Jim, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be back for a final segment of StarTalk Cosmic Queries.

• 31:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back for a final segment of StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition. I'm with Chuck Nice.

• 31:09Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 31:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The subject is curing cancer. And we got all up in the face of Dr. Jim Allison.

• 31:16Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 31:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, he's here with us here and now. Just won the Nobel Prize in Human Physiology, one of the categories of the Nobel Prize. And we've been, we've been picking his brain about this with our, with our queries.

• 31:30Chuck Nice?

  With our queries.

• 31:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So again, Jim, thanks for being on StarTalk and let's continue. What do you have?

• 31:34Chuck Nice?

  All right. This is Kyle Coombs from Facebook. And Kyle is from Airjury Canada and says, is there a chance if we never find a cure for the many types of cancers that humans will one day, in a Darwinian sense, evolve out of cancer? So a little awkwardly worded, but what he's saying is, can we evolve?

• 31:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If it's killing us.

• 31:56Chuck Nice?

  If it's killing us, can we evolve beyond cancer? Kind of like selective breeding, the sense where the small percentage of people who do not develop cancer will be naturally pre-selected to continue propagating the species. Interesting question. Not sure if that's your expertise, but.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Well, evolution is driven by survival of the fittest, you know, so it works on, on develop, let's put it this way, once you've made your children, evolution doesn't give a damn about you. So there's not a lot of evolutionary pressure to, you know, so I think childhood cancers and stuff, there may be pressure to get rid of it. But I really don't think that, that there's going to be any selection against. People that are old or the typical age to get cancer because there's just no reason. That doesn't make you fitter and able to reproduce more. I guess society could change enough where that becomes different. But biologically, I don't think it would have.

• 32:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if you have babies, you know, nature's done with you.

• 32:59Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, you propagated your, your.

• 33:01Chuck Nice?

  Right, because that's really what the whole thing is about, right?

• 33:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what the whole thing is about.

• 33:04Chuck Nice?

  It's all about sending your DNA into the future.

• 33:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and what happens to you afterwards? No one gives a rat's ass about.

• 33:09Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 33:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:11Chuck Nice?

  Boy, nature, what a cruel mistress she is, huh? God, all right, well, there you go. That's a, that was a great question then and, and a very disturbing answer.

• 33:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, by the way, so you know, the Darwin Award is given out annually to the person who does something completely stupid and ends up dying for having done so.

• 33:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, it's called the Darwin Award. But you can only get that award if you've died for doing something stupid and have not yet had kids.

• 33:39Chuck Nice?

  Right, because then you already sent your stupidity forward.

• 33:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you would have, right, you would have. So it's, it's calling the herd as it is given out every year.

• 33:48Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 33:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you don't want to ever be a winner of it because it means you're dead.

• 33:51Chuck Nice?

  True.

• 33:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  FYI.

• 33:52Chuck Nice?

  Yes. And stupid.

• 33:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's stupid.

• 33:56Chuck Nice?

  And that's no way to go through life, dead and stupid.

• 34:02Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 34:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll take one or the other, but not both.

• 34:06Chuck Nice?

  I want both, God. Okay.

• 34:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 34:10Chuck Nice?

  Uh, Mohammed Amir from Facebook says, naked mole rats, sharks and rays have immunity evolved to efficiently resist cancer. How is this possible? And can we use that to our advantage? I know some time ago, there was a, a great deal of extensive research into, uh, broccoli enzymes and, and shark DNA and are, are we still headed down that path, doctor?

• 34:40Speaker 02

  There's still a lot of studies. I mean, sharks do have an immune system, but it's very, it's very simple compared to ours. And it's true that they don't get cancer very often, but, um, I don't think we really understand why that is. I mean, one reason is because until recently, the ocean was pretty free of carcinogens and things and, uh.

• 35:02Chuck Nice?

  Well, we're changing, we're changing that.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:06Chuck Nice?

  We're, we're certainly on top of that one.

• 35:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, I, I, allow me to ask a stupid question. How do we know the cause of death of sharks?

• 35:17Speaker 02

  That's a good question. I have no idea.

• 35:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's doing this? Who's? Cause it seems to me when you die in the ocean, you are bait and consumed instantly by everybody else within minutes.

• 35:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 35:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't just be laying up there dead and think that-

• 35:30Chuck Nice?

  There are no shark mummies.

• 35:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  I guess occasionally some, some wash up on shore or something.

• 35:37Chuck Nice?

  Okay, okay. All right. All right. Well, there you have it.

• 35:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. What else you got to check?

• 35:41Chuck Nice?

  Let's move on to Jess Nudalo, who says this. I don't know if this would fall under the topic, but I'd like to go down a different direction and ask if we can take advantage of cancer cells at all. I've heard of the Hela or H E L A cells, which may be relevant, but can't say that I'm an expert on the subject. Well, thank you for explaining yourself so incredibly detailed. Um, uh, is, is there a way? Is there any time where a cancer cell can be beneficial to the host? Can that mutation do something good in any way?

• 36:18Speaker 02

  Well, no, but cells, we take cell, cancer cells out of patients all the time and use them to study what caused cancer and how they respond to treatments and stuff. So, so that's what those, those Hela cells that he's talking about were used for, for years. And now there's a lot of cell lines like that that are in use for research.

• 36:38Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 36:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's good to know. Good to know.

• 36:40Chuck Nice?

  Excellent. Let's go to, uh, Vasilius Economo- oh, Iconomid- mm-mm, Iconomitus, okay?

• 36:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's Greek. Just, just go into Greek.

• 36:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 36:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Feel the Greek in you.

• 36:54Chuck Nice?

  Just feel, I'm gonna feel the Greek. It would be Iconomitus.

• 36:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 36:57Chuck Nice?

  Iconomitus.

• 36:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Iconomitus, yeah.

• 36:59Chuck Nice?

  Vasilius Iconomitus. See, when you said it was Greek, the Greek came out of me. Man, look at that. Yeah. Greek chuck nice. All right. Have there been any advancements in stem cell research that connect to or better our understanding of cancer research?

• 37:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think stem cells is in all the news all the time.

• 37:19Chuck Nice?

  That's all the time.

• 37:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A hot, a hot topic too.

• 37:22Chuck Nice?

  All the rage.

• 37:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Politically charged.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. Again, there's, there's a lot that's being learned from using stem cells to, to figure out how to put in the right genes and have them develop normally. And also again, to discover things about how they can go awry. Now as far as- Things can go awry, they can become cancer cells, but so far as is using those to treat cancers somewhere again, that's I don't think anybody would do that, but but they've been very useful in in in learning, you know, the mechanisms, the workings of cells.

• 37:56Chuck Nice?

  There seems to be, you know, two two separate approaches. One is taking these cells and learning, but uh uh but the treat or treating and preventing is is kind of in a different area.

• 38:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually, actually, I I left out something that's really big that I I was thinking of the the public perception of stem cells, but leukemia is very often treated by by with stem cells. The patient's bone marrow, all of their blood producing cells are killed with chemicals and radiation and they're replaced them with stem cells which grow up and replace all the blood cells. And there's been some thought in in some other cancers that you could do the same thing.

• 38:37Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's appropriate, but so far, except for leukemias, that really hasn't gone before. People have tried it in breast cancer, but but as far as I know, nothing's worked yet.

• 38:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the answer is yes, but in a in a in a limited way so far.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, in fact, it used to be the only way to cure leukemia was like with stem cells.

• 38:55Chuck Nice?

  Wow. And is that because when they with with they're really kind of resetting the entire immune system because they destroy everything, right? Kind of go down to like a tablerrasa and then then in then when you inject those stem cells, you're actually kind of like jumpstart.

• 39:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're jumpstarting.

• 39:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, jumpstarting.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, it all starts over and replenishes everything eventually.

• 39:17Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  Lucky, if you're lucky, they got rid of all the cancer cells before.

• 39:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what that reminds me of? The poop transplant that they've been doing lately. You know about that?

• 39:29Chuck Nice?

  By the way.

• 39:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People have chronic digestive problems and and they just take they put somebody else's poop inside of them and it jumps it restarts the the the the flora, uh, the the.

• 39:43Chuck Nice?

  So it gives them a healthy gut biome.

• 39:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somebody else's.

• 39:46Chuck Nice?

  Somebody else's.

• 39:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Has a new start.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  Absolutely, that that actually works quite well. But what what the number of groups have found recently in in including Dr. Jennifer Wargo here at MD Anderson and Melanoma. You could sort of get an idea of whether somebody's going to respond to therapy or not by the kind of bacteria they have in their in their poop, if you will. And so there's some thought, and we're actually working with with her a little bit on this, of trying to find out what the real good bacteria are, you know, and giving them to patients while they're getting their immunotherapies.

• 40:19Chuck Nice?

  Sounds like some crappy research.

• 40:22Chuck Nice?

  I I couldn't help it. I know, hit me, go ahead. I deserve it. I deserve it. I deserve it.

• 40:29Chuck Nice?

  All right, um, this is Sirius Frost, uh, from Twitter, and he says, or she says, because it doesn't give a gender. Uh, do you think that, and this is for both of you guys, I don't know, uh, do you think that with the recent spate of development in quantum computing, we would see the rise of nanotechnology as a feasible solution to cancer and other ailments reasonably soon? That's that's hard to say reasonably soon, but.

• 40:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just tell you what I know, and I'd be delighted to then defer over over to Jim. Think about it. If you construct any, I'm going to give a a cosmic perspective on this.

• 41:05Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 41:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you construct anything, it'll, in the end of the day, it has, it will relate to, uh, what is the size of the thing that your tool can manipulate?

• 41:16Chuck Nice?

  Uh huh.

• 41:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so if it's a brick building, then you had grab bricks and you put bricks in place, okay? But if you want to make something smaller than a brick, then you need a tool that's smaller than the brick holder. You need like tweezers, okay? Now, if you want to make something smaller than what tweezers make, you need something than the thing that it is you're making. All right, so if you're gonna, if you're gonna make. Molecules, you need tools that are smaller than the molecule to assemble

• 41:43Speaker 02

  To build the molecule.

• 41:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To build the molecule, okay. So, there's a quantum tools that have, in fact, one of the Nobel Prizes this year, in 2018, if I remember the bio of it, references tools that enable you to manipulate atoms and particles. And if you can do that, if the folks in the cancer research say, you know what we need? We need this other molecule in this particular way, in this particular configuration, then I bring in the nano tools, the nano toolbox. And then, then he's got, then he can bring his genius to the problem.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are a lot of people working on that, just as you said, because you can make things to deliver drugs with a lot of precision and deliver multiple things at the same time. So, there's a lot of activity there, something that looks pretty promising.

• 42:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm going to take host privilege and ask the last question. I just happened to be sitting in front of a book written by a colleague of mine, it's called Cosmic Discovery. This was published like 30, 40 years ago, but this was very influential on me because as an astrophysicist, I said, I want to see what he says about discovery. And you read through it, and half the book is a description of how advances in modern astrophysics only came about because of some advance in another field, in particular physics. The physicist invented some other detector, or some other tool, or some other thing. Then it gets applied to our work, and then we make discoveries.

• 43:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You were describing using radiation therapy to zap the immune system and jumpstart it. Physicists, you got that from physicists, you guys didn't invent that, we did, okay? So, are you, are you in need of some new physics advance to help you do your work? And can you comment on the leaps that your field has taken when engineering or other technological advances show up at your doorstep?

• 43:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I can say two things about that. One is the technological advances in computation and a lot of analytical machines that we use now that are now allowing us to figure stuff out about cancers. And what's going on inside of it with with great speed and precision didn't exist four years ago, five years ago.

• 44:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Four years ago.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  And so, uh, so there's just a lot of effort there. But and and then imaging too, because we know now that, you know, it'd be useful often to know what cells next to another one and what's going on. And then, uh, um.

• 44:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is imaging with precision to be able to see that level of detail.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  And then, and then I think there are a lot of advances being made in the, in the treatment area of really giving more powerful radiation, a more focused, uh, way. If we could figure out how to tune that to, to really kill just the tumor cells and not surrounding immune tissue or anything, we might, that might help develop really more effective ways, not, not a huge leap, but more effective ways of, of treating cancer. But, but certainly the analytical techniques that we've come up with are just amazing. Um, there's a, something that happens now that, well, not so much anymore, but in the early days of, of these immune therapy drugs, tumors would sometimes get big really fast.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  And so the doctors looking at them and the pathologists looking at them would say, wow, your drug isn't curing cancer, it's making them grow faster. Uh, but when you take it out, cut it open, it'd be full of T cells, you know? But if a tumor's way inside somebody, you can't really do that. So new imaging techniques that allow us to tell the difference between a cell, there are metabolic ways now of imaging them, but you can't tell a tumor's treating a rapidly dividing T cell and a rapidly dividing cancer cell. So we need something better there to help us diagnose and, and follow disease.

• 45:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So for me, that, that's a, a call for funding of research on all frontiers and then cross pollinating them so that all can benefit. Right? There's none of this, well, let's study this kind of science now and we'll put the other kind of science on hold. You just have no idea at the frontier what the, what that, uh, cross benefits might be. Absolutely.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And I, and one of the things that I try to do whenever I can is point out that. What we found out that ended up being the basis of this new therapy, that research had nothing to do with cancer whatsoever. I was doing it because I wanted to know how T cells worked.

• 46:19Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  And when I figured that out, I kind of scratched my head and went, hey, maybe we could do some, you know, and it worked. So, but it wasn't the reason for doing the work.

• 46:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And for those who are only listening to that comment, he actually scratched his head on video.

• 46:31Chuck Nice?

  Yes, he did.

• 46:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When he said, I scratched my head.

• 46:33Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 46:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think we got it. We got to wrap this up. Uh, Dr. Jim, it's been a delight to have you on and congratulations first on your research. Cause that's what matters most. The Nobel Prize isn't after the fact, uh, recognition of it. Um, it's at the end of the day. It's the, um, it's your research that'll make the difference in the world, not the fact that you got the Nobel Prize for it. And so I just want to.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  It's all those people that are saved now that are the prize really.

• 47:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. And I want to thank you and your team and others and just the whole enterprise of those who have given their lives to just improve the lives of others. And so.

• 47:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yes. And, uh, although it's a shame that my mom could not benefit from the, uh, from the work that you've done and everybody in your field, not just you, it's collective you. Uh, the beauty of being able to, uh, see how the field operates is, uh, everything that she went through is going to help somebody else. And that's, that's the cool thing about what you do. So thank you.

• 47:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. This has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries Cancer Cure Edition. And Dr. Jim Allison, again, thanks for being with us.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Well, thank you for giving me the opportunity.

• 47:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've been with my co-host Chuck Nice. Chuck, always good to have you here.

• 47:54Chuck Nice?

  Always good to be here.

• 47:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I am Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And as always, I bid you to keep looking up.