Readers of The Cancer Letter and listeners of The Cancer Letter Podcast are familiar with the impact of President Donald Trump’s first nine months in office on the field of oncology. Now, the threats posed to oncology are being brought to the attention of a general audience—Jonathan Mahler, staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, wrote an in-depth article about how the Trump administration’s actions have brought chaos, uncertainty, and damage to the oncology research community.
This episode is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
In this episode of In the Headlines, Mahler spoke with Paul Goldberg, publisher and editor of The Cancer Letter, and Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor, about becoming immersed in the history of oncology research (going all the way back to Mary Lasker and the National Cancer Act), and the personal and professional impact of the seemingly-bureaucratic policy changes coming down from the White House.
Mahler’s article introduces a lay audience to the intricacies of the oncology research enterprise, and how this complex network of actors—including federal agencies, academic and community cancer centers, patient advocacy groups, and professional societies—was necessary to produce the drastic improvements in survival and quality of life outcomes of the last 50 years.
Mahler has no qualms describing Trump’s actions as a deliberate attack on biomedical research.
“The NIH and NCI, as you guys know better than anyone, are designed to be apolitical institutions,” Mahler said. “They are designed to be insulated from political attack. So, in order to undermine them, to really have to do this kind of damage to their agenda, takes some work and takes some forethought. And I think you see that when you start to look at how all of this unfolded beginning just days after the inauguration, that it was a deliberate strategy. And so, you kind of have to see it that way, and people who are working there certainly saw it that way.”
Stories mentioned in this podcast include:
- The Directors: Ben Ho Park and Suresh Ramalingam discuss tough times, uncertainty, and resilience “If you’re going to be an oncologist, we look at the glass 5% full, not 95% empty.”
- Reflections of a cancer scientist Maintaining the pace of novel technologies will lead to more efficient and less toxic medicines
- Nobel laureate David Baltimore dies at 87 Baltimore discovered that genetic material of tumor viruses could make DNA from their RNA genome
- Harvey Golomb, past chair of UChicago’s Department of Medicine, dies at 82
- Bonnie Addario, lung cancer survivor and advocate, dies at 77
- NCAB approves five reissue concepts
- After stormy Senate hearing, Trump offers tepid support for RFK Jr. while Kennedy family members call for his ouster
- Vinay Prasad regains role as FDA chief medical and scientific officer
This episode was transcribed using transcription services. It has been reviewed by our editorial staff, but the transcript may be imperfect.
The following is a transcript of this week’s In the Headlines, a weekly series on The Cancer Letter Podcast:
Jacquelyn Cobb: This week on The Cancer Letter Podcast.
Jonathan Mahler: The NIH and NCI, as you guys know better than anyone, are designed to be apolitical institutions. They are designed to be insulated from political attack. In order to undermine them, to do this kind of damage to their agenda takes some work and takes some forethought. I think you see that when you start to look at how all of this unfolded beginning just days after the inauguration. It was a deliberate strategy. You have to see it that way and people who are working there certainly saw it that way.
Paul Goldberg: You are listening to The Cancer Letter Podcast. The Cancer Letter is a weekly independent magazine covering oncology since 1973. I’m your host, Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancel Letter.
Jacquelyn Cobb: And I’m your host, Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor of The Cancer Letter. We’ll be bringing you the latest stories, groundbreaking research, and critical conversations shaping oncology.
Paul Goldberg: Let’s get going.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Hello, Paul. How are you?
Paul Goldberg: Hi, Jacquelyn. How are you? Hope you had a great weekend.
Jacquelyn Cobb: I did. It felt really long for some reason this weekend, I think. We went down to Boston on Friday night. And I think when you do something big on Friday night, it extends the feeling of the weekend. You get like three days rather than two. It was fun.
Paul Goldberg: Sweet.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yes. I was talking to Sarah about sweep recently and she was like, “What exactly does that mean?” I was having a hard time defining it in English terms. It makes sense to me, but… Yeah.
Paul Goldberg: Yeah, a very important term.
Jacquelyn Cobb: It is. For our publication, our cover stories have to have sweep. They have to.
Paul Goldberg: They have to.
Jacquelyn Cobb: When I was thinking about the podcast, I really did want to bring up a very traditional small talk conversation, which is fall starting, autumn starting. Are you in on that? Are you plugged in on that at all, Paul? It’s a very millennial woman thing, too, I think as well. All the stuff at Trader Joe’s, all of the maple flavored products…
Paul Goldberg: We don’t have that much in D.C.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Oh, yeah. It’s a little…
Paul Goldberg: Yeah, it’s…
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah.
Paul Goldberg: Best stayed in Vermont, which would’ve been wise. I would’ve known all about autumn, but here it’s just some trees are losing some leaves. That’s about it, not much.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’m fully breaking out the cozy sweater, so I’m really excited about it. I’m going to do some cozy gaming. I got a whole thing I’m really excited about it. I was wondering if you are, too, but you’re going to have to get to Vermont at some point, so…
Paul Goldberg: I mean, it does get the sweater weather here too.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. Yeah. But still, the leaves… Do you ever do Vermont in the fall? I should know this.
Paul Goldberg: No, for some reason I hardly ever.
Jacquelyn Cobb: That’s crazy.
Paul Goldberg: It’s busy here. It gets very busy and it’s a big to-do to get out there in the fall. I’m not sure I’ve been very often at all every now and then.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. It is busy here at this time, but, gosh, foliage season? Whoo.
Paul Goldberg: That’s very, very beautiful. I think I’ve seen it.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah.
Paul Goldberg: Usually the only times I’ve been there, it was really the beginning of the stick season. I’ve missed every time.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. Oh, gosh. It’s fine.
Paul Goldberg: I mean, you can’t ski yet.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for what you want out of Vermont, it does make sense to go in the winter.
Paul Goldberg: Biking, no skiing. You can go hiking in the woods, which is fine. Great. Fabulous. I love that.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. Yeah.
Paul Goldberg: But no mushrooms.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Remind me later. I would like to circle back on our mushroom conversation because curious, but we don’t need to belabor the point with our listeners.
Paul Goldberg: Yeah, we should have a private conversation about mushrooms. People often do.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah, it’s all PG, though, I swear. All right. Before we go further down that rabbit hole-
Paul Goldberg: Also my initials, by the way.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Ah, yeah. Silly that that’s never come up. That’s funny. I will take us through last week’s headlines. Our cover story was focused on the new episode of The Directors, which is a special segment of The Cancer Letter Podcast. You can check that out on Spotify, Apple, anywhere you get your podcast, YouTube. In the podcast and the story, Ben Ho Park, director of Vanderbilt Ingram Cancer Center, and Suresh Ramalingam, executive director of Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, had a really frank and engaging discussion among themselves about how this year’s federal policy changes are affecting their cancer centers. We’ll talk a little bit more about that later in the podcast. We’ll get into a little bit more depth.
We had a guest editorial by Ze’ev Ronai about how the trajectory of cancer research has been toward more and more complexity over the last 50 or so years and how we have to continue discoveries like that in order to continue improving the lives of people with cancer. It was a really cool story. It was like a call and response type story, question and answer story. Pretty short, so definitely worth taking a look because it’s not what we normally publish. It was fun.
We had three obituaries last week. They were somewhat leftover from August, but we had them all in this week’s issue. It was a pretty heavy issue in that way. The three people were Nobel Laureate David Baltimore, who discovered that tumor viruses could make DNA from their RNA genome. That’s the discovery he won the Nobel for. The second person was Harvey Golomb, past chair of UChicago’s Department of Medicine, and the third was Bonnie Adario who was a lung cancer survivor and staunch advocate.
We also wrote about the National Cancer Advisory Board approving five reissue concepts. We always write about concepts. It’s usually not a big deal, sort of just a reporting on the situation for people who care in our field, but last week’s was a little bit more interesting because it was the first time that the National Cancer Advisory Board approved these reissue concepts. It was five reissue concepts and it was the first time they stepped up for the now disbanded Board Of Scientific Advisers.
In cancer policy, we had some follow-up stories about HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after his appearance before the Senate Finance Committee last week. We also had a follow-up story about Vinay Prasad who has now regained his role as chief medical and scientific officer at FDA. That’s.
Our issue last week. We can talk briefly about the directors in more detail. I thought it was really interesting. It’s not our first directors anymore. We are really in the swing of things with having these really influential leaders in oncology speak really openly and frankly with each other about what’s happening in oncology right now. For me, when I was reading it, what stuck out was the fact that they were giving us real specifics on how the federal, with like I said already, but how the federal policy changes have impacted their cancer centers. It really felt like a glimpse behind the curtain for me at least. I know, Paul, you’re talking with cancer center directors all the time, but for me it was really interesting.
Paul Goldberg: Yeah. I mean, the whole idea of the directors was to document what’s happening and start as it starts to happen. We do have a really running tally, not only of the numbers, which are not always clear in the beginning as an impact, as a kind of psychological impact, the impact on the ethos of the field. The objective is to show the impact, to trace it step by step, and to have the directors talking really peer to peer with me asking questions and prompting and directing the conversation but no more than that, and everybody listening. There’s this kind of a community leaders talking to the community, and the objective was to make sure that the community, meaning that all the people involved in cancer research, are not… The community is not beheaded, that we recognize that there are 73… Is it 73 leaders in this field? It’s actually more than that. To have everybody here from everybody else, that’s the whole longitudinal reason for having The Directors as a podcast.
The objective is to get the directors to speak to each other. In this case, it really did happen. It was Suresh Ramalingam and Ben Ho Park, and they had a chat with me throwing in questions here and there. But I was pressing on what are the specific harms that they have experienced. They were answering those questions, and then the way I think Bev Ginsburg summarized it for us as a discussant was really the reason we… Having a discussant is so helpful. We’ve been doing this for a long time, many of us, she has, I have, and we’ve never seen anything like this. This is unprecedented. This is a war on the war on cancer and the positions are still holding. Let’s hope they hold forever.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Talking about the War on cancer, I’ll set you up for that, Paul.
Paul Goldberg: Yeah, it’s really interesting. There’s a story in The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine. I can hold it up or we can—
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah.
Paul Goldberg: The war on cancer: canceled. Is it canceled? It’s interesting if it is. It’s really incredible way of putting it. I love the graphics, because it’s in dialogue with the famous ubiquitous logo of MD Anderson.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yep. Yep, similar colors.
Paul Goldberg: Which is “Making cancer history.” Well, making war on cancer history is what the argument is here. With us today, we have Jonathan Mahler, whose excellent story appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine and it’s a story… The title is shocking, the war on cancer canceled, and deliberately shocking and appropriately shocking I might add.
Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us on The Cancer Letter Podcast. It’s really wonderful to see The Times give this so much attention and to tell the story in long form the way you just did is very helpful. Let’s talk about what you found. What did you find?
Jonathan Mahler: Well, I found what really appears to be a systematic dismantling of this system, or at the very least a deliberate defunding of it, which I think is tantamount to dismantling of it. Some of it is already underway, some of it has already happened, some of it I think is still a little bit TBD, but the administration has made its intentions clear. I’m talking there about the attempt to cut indirect cost rates and, maybe equally important, the president’s proposed budget, which, if enacted, if adopted, would be a huge cut to cancer research. We have already the freezing suspension and cancellation of a lot of cancer-related grants, plus these two looming issues with the indirect cost cut in the budget. All of this adds up to a pretty worrying scenario.
Paul Goldberg: Jonathan, when we talked early on, you were trying to figure out how to tell the story and you ended up telling the story. I was actually pushing for a patient, because I think it’s important to see patient voices. And you actually do mention the patient, your mother, but you did tell the story through a researcher and maybe we should focus on her a bit.
Jonathan Mahler: Yeah. I mean, what I was trying to do ultimately was give people a 360-degree view of the whole ecosystem. What I wanted to do was give you a close look at a researcher, at an institution, a research institution, in this case UMass, and I wanted to take people inside the government, inside the NIH and the NCI. I did, as you say, want to give people a look at a patient as it happens. I ended up using my mom as opposed to a current patient.
The way I tried to structure the story was to start with the researcher, and we can talk about her a bit more if you want later, and then to pull back and give people a bigger picture view of what was going on with the Trump administration and cancer research and biomedical research more broadly. Then I wanted to take people up a notch from the researcher to the institution, then I tried to pull back again and tell people a little bit more about the history of the war on cancer and the arc of the war on cancer. And then finally, I wanted to take people into the government, into the NCI, into the NIH, and show them how these cuts have been playing out inside the government. And then finally take this to the most human level to the story of my mom. That was the structure. Yeah.
Paul Goldberg: That was an excellent structure. Totally worked.
Jonathan Mahler: Oh, thank you.
Paul Goldberg: Yeah—
Jonathan Mahler: Structuring these 7,000-word stories, let me tell you.
Paul Goldberg: It’s harder to construct the 7,000-word story than the 75,000-word story, right?
Jonathan Mahler: Right, because you can’t just go start to finish. You have to jump around.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. I mean, I’m really excited to talk to you about this. I have a lot of questions. I think the main thing for me is we’ve covered everything that’s in your story, we’ve covered as it’s been happening. I feel very immersed in this story and it was really cool to read it from start to finish like how you had it. But the piece that, I guess as a young journalist, that I have been hesitant to comment on and obviously I think it’s hard to find people in the field to comment on as well is the fact that this is a dismantling, that it’s not a shift in priorities. I mean, it is that as well, but the one quote that really made this stand out for me was “they have studied how NIH works, studied it hard, and learned it well, and they have put sand in the gears in ways that are very effective and devastating.” I feel like that just brought it all together for me where I was like, “This is how I’ve been feeling for the last nine months.” But it was really interesting and somewhat validating, I think, to have somebody who actually really is an expert in this say that. Yeah, I just wonder how you brought that up with people.
Jonathan Mahler: I mean, I think that there’s a tendency to see this, as I put it in the story, as collateral damage. There’s a war on government waste and the pushback against the liberal universities and specifically with anti-Semitism, and that you can see this through one lens as, “Well, this is just collateral damage. This is just fallout.”
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah.
Jonathan Mahler: But when you look a little more closely, you see that this isn’t so easy to do. I mean, the NIH and NCI, as you guys know better than anyone, are designed to be apolitical institutions. They are designed to be insulated from political attack. In order to undermine them, to do this kind of damage to their agenda takes some work and takes some forethought. I think you see that when you start to look at how all of this unfolded beginning just days after the inauguration. It was a deliberate strategy. You have to see it that way and people who were working there certainly saw it that way.
I felt, in some ways, part of my job was to reframe this a little bit for people to see this as something more than collateral damage. This is clearly something more than that. I think that if you want to look at this from a more generous point of view, you can say, “Okay…” You mentioned shifting priorities. Okay, they feel that this biomedical research system needs to be reformed, but show us the reform, because all I see here is defunding and dismantling.
Paul Goldberg: Yeah. We saw exactly what you saw. And like any great story, it ends with a question. In this case, the question as Harold Varmus says, which is why would we want to destroy one of our great greatest assets? He is absolutely right. Why are they doing this? I agree that this is deliberate.
Jonathan Mahler: Yeah. I mean, I really don’t have a great answer to that question, I mean, after spending months researching this. The easiest explanations would be that government waste would be… This was a way to get at the liberal elite research institutions and payback for COVID, payback against the scientific establishment. Just on the surface, those seem to be the three most obvious explanations. But I mean, none of them quite explains why you would take something that’s been so successful.
Again, I tried to go out of my way in this piece to make it clear that I am not suggesting that this is a system that wouldn’t benefit from some reform, but we’re not seeing anything other than defunding and destruction and dismantling at this point. I don’t know. I mean, I guess you could take the Silicon Valley, the tech perspective on this, which is we need to disrupt the system. We need to give more power to private companies and take power away from the government and private companies will be more willing to take risks. Why have we not cured cancer yet? I guess you can look at it through that lens, but the problem there is that we’re not seeing any new programs unless I’m missing them, but I have not seen anything new. I’ve only seen subtraction here.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I was just wondering… This is not my field, so I’m really just asking out of curiosity here, but I imagine that a lot of this is also happening outside of oncology. Well, I know a lot of it is happening outside of oncology and I’m assuming that most of it is. I’m just wondering, well, one, I guess why did you choose oncology specifically to cover? And two, I guess I am curious about details about the other side of things. I know Alzheimer’s research was a big thing, vaccines… All of it has touch points to oncology but…
Jonathan Mahler: Yeah. Yeah. I wasn’t quite sure when I started in on the story. I wasn’t quite sure I was going to zero in on oncology and on cancer, but I felt like to try to tell the whole biomedical research story would just be a little too sprawling. Already, cancer is such a huge… This is such a sprawling institution or such a sprawling ecosystem to begin with that it was going to be hard enough just to deal with that. It really was more a decision that just narratively, I felt like it would be impossible to do anything more than one specific field.
Because of the way that the war on cancer has unfolded over the decades, it seemed to be such a great and powerful illustration of how this works. I mean, how you need to do this basic biological investigation, how it takes years and years and years for all of that investigation and research to begin to accrue and to begin to lead to real progress. This idea that we are just now and over the course of the last couple of decades have been able to make great breakthroughs and we are poised for more, that it took so many decades to get here. And that just at this moment, I mean, as… I quote Ned Sharpless in this piece, saying that we are at maybe the most fertile period of cancer research in history. It makes it a little more tragic, but I felt that the story of the war on cancer was such a powerful illustration of how biomedical research has to work and the patience that it requires and just the recognition that it is incremental. It has to be incremental.
Paul Goldberg: Especially the basic research. I think commercialization you can probably… Some of it can go somewhere else and the questions that are asked. All of that is really important, but it’s also, this is a national idea of who we are as Americans, because in 1971, America became the first country ever to declare war on disease. If this is canceled, I think everybody should pay attention. That’s my question. I hate to be one of those guys who ask a really long question, but I will nonetheless. Congress has not gone along with this so far and probably won’t and it hasn’t in the past. Do you think there’s hope out there?
Jonathan Mahler: Yeah. I mean, certainly, that’s the question is how much is Congress going to… Certainly, historically it has not. It has pushed back. I mean, I think there is hope that it will push back again, but I think there will also probably be compromises. Will Trump get this 37, 38% cut to cancer research? Maybe not, but will it stay the same or will there be some kind of small cut perhaps? I mean, I don’t know. And then there’s the question of indirect rates, which I think we’re certainly looking at some kind of cut there. I think I’d be very surprised if we don’t see some kind of cut there.
And then we’re talking about a whole change in how the grant-making process… It does seem clear that there is a consolidation of power around the grant-making process, a politicization of the grant-making process that seems to be happening, given how many new political appointees there are now at NIH. Is Trump going to be able to get everything he wants here and everything he’s proposing? I mean, quite possibly not, but I think it’s pretty clear that a lot of damage has already been done and that there are going to be pretty big changes.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. I mean, you illustrated this really amazingly in your article with Dr. Sirianni, how even if the budget is flat from last year… Let’s say it’s best case scenario, we get some kind of raise, indirect costs stay as they were. The damage that has been done, like you said, is disruptive. It will take time to get that back. Projects have been lost, projects have fallen through the cracks. And so even absolute best case scenario, there has been serious trouble brought to this field, and I think that that’s-
Jonathan Mahler: Yeah. Yeah, and I think people are, scientists and young scientists in particular don’t… I mean, why would you want to go into this field in the United States right now? It just feels so unstable and chaotic, really.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Paul Goldberg: How did you decide on UMass and Dr. Sirianni?
Jonathan Mahler: Yeah. I talked to a lot of different people and a lot of different researchers. Again, I thought her story, someone who was just, by chance, happened to have all of her NIH grants coming up in 2025 and 2026 and the fact that she specialized in pediatric brain cancer and in a particular type of medulloblastoma, particular type of cancer that is very aggressive and relatively rare. You feel like it’s something that no VC is going to want to spend money investigating. And yet, it’s something that is devastating for children and something that we as a country should be prioritizing. Also, the fact that her research could have implications for so many other fields beyond cancer as just her research could potentially change how other neurodegenerative diseases are treated. It felt like it encapsulated a lot of the story as well. The very fact that she had to shut a study down, I mean, it seemed crazy to me that someone who’s an NIH-funded scientist who’s had great success so far and seems to be making great progress is being disrupted. It felt just so illustrative of this moment.
Jacquelyn Cobb: There was a quote from her as well in the story that says, “When you remove me from the ecosystem, you’re removing something that can’t be replaced.” Exactly what you just
Jonathan Mahler: Exactly. Yeah, yeah.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Please go ahead.
Jonathan Mahler: Yeah. And then what made me more inclined to want to use her as my main research character was that when I spoke to the chancellor there, Dr. Collins, he was very cooperative. Not all of these medical school chancellors would be willing to really walk me through everything they’ve been through. They’re all understandably nervous, but he was very open about all the chaos and uncertainty and the fact that he had to rescind offers to basically the entire class of PhDs. The fact that he had to lay off 200 people… I mean, he walked me through everything and told me how basically the money stopped appearing and the grant money stopped showing up. I mean, he had no other choice.
The fact that I had her and then I had him, I felt like it was in this magazine world. You’re always kind of trying to find the people who will help you tell the story and they seemed like good candidates. I also liked the fact that it was not Harvard, that it was not Columbia, that it was not a school that had even… It was not on the administration’s radar at all. And yet, here they are, and it’s a state university. They don’t have a massive endowment. They don’t have a hospital that’s throwing off tons of revenues. They’re doing the best they can. Yeah.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah, absolutely.
Paul Goldberg: That’s interesting. As we covered this, I’m trying not to fall into this trap of saying, “Oh, well, that’s just DEI, just a little flesh wound. Oh, that’s just…” At what point do you kind of draw the line and say, “None of it is okay. It’s not to be expected”? But let’s talk about your mom. What happened there?
Jonathan Mahler: Yeah. Yeah, this was just very coincidental that my mom died of lung cancer years ago. Just last summer, I had a respiratory infection that wasn’t going away, so I went to see the pulmonologist who treated her and just because he was a guy… My father was a physician and they were friendly, so I’d known him. I mean, I hadn’t talked to him really since my mom died, but I needed a pulmonologist so he was the logical guy to call. When I went to see him, he just mentioned offhand, “It’s too bad your mother isn’t sick now, because I would’ve had a more tools to treat her with.” I clocked it at the time. We talked about it a little bit, but not much.
And then when I started working on this story, I thought, “I should give Dr. Libby a call because that was an interesting aside he made, a comment he made, and I’d be curious to hear more.” And so I called him and we talked for a while and he explained everything that he would be doing with her today that he was unable to do with her in 2007, 2008. He felt that… First of all, my mom, she had lung cancer. By the time she was diagnosed, it was too late for radiation. It was too late for surgery. She just did this really toxic course of chemotherapy and I remember I would take her to some of her chemotherapy appointments, and then afterwards, for days, she would just be a wreck. She couldn’t eat. She’s barely out of bed.
He said he would’ve used immunotherapy. He would not have used chemotherapy at all and her quality of life during her treatment would’ve been much better. And that he thought that she would’ve lived at least another six months, maybe another year. That’s a long time. My mom died basically a year after she was diagnosed and the thought that I had my two small children at the time who are now both in college, and the fact that my mom could have spent six more months, maybe another year, seeing her grandchildren and that her quality of life during that period of time would’ve been much better. She would’ve been able to really spend time with them and enjoy it. It really says a ton about how this whole system operates.
I mean, we’re not talking about… A lot of this is 2008. This is not that long ago and a lot of progress has been made in those intervening years. I mean, it’s kind of incredible. You think about, “Well, what does it mean if we start to defund this system?” I mean, in some ways there’s a amazing paradox here, because we don’t even know what treatments are not going to be discovered, what breakthroughs are not going to happen. But history has shown that this system is incredible and it produces incredible results and that is a perfect example of it.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah, absolutely.
Paul Goldberg: Yeah. Yeah. Jacquelyn, do you have any more questions?
Jacquelyn Cobb: I have a final question, but I want to save it for the end if you have anything else, Paul.
Paul Goldberg: No, this was just a fabulous thing to see the story. Well, maybe there is a question. When do we start hearing from patients?
Jonathan Mahler: Yeah.
Paul Goldberg: What do you think?
Jonathan Mahler: Yeah. I’ve been getting a lot of emails from people, from patients, from loved ones of patients, and some have been on The Hill I know testifying, right? But yeah, I don’t know. I think more patients would be helpful, for sure. Yeah.
Paul Goldberg: Because we were talking about the single largest constituency probably in the world arguably. Certainly in the United States too.
Jonathan Mahler: Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that’s right. Yeah. Yeah.
Paul Goldberg: Jacquelyn?
Jacquelyn Cobb: My question is from a journalist to a journalist, less so about the oncology thing. I’m just curious how long this story took, because it is large and you said in it that you spoke to at least 50 members of America’s biomedical research system, so I’m just curious about that.
Jonathan Mahler: And some others too, yeah. I mean, well, Paul, we could see when my first call to you was because you were pretty early on. I was going to say June, yeah. June to September. I mean, I guess that’s about right, so a few months. Yeah, it was a lot of material. I had 160 pages of notes when I sat down to write.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Oh, my gosh. That’s awesome.
Jonathan Mahler: Honestly, I had a lot to learn. I mean, you guys covered this, I do not, so I had to get up to speed. I knew a little bit about cancer because of my mom, honestly, but otherwise I was totally new to this. I’d read some, but I had to learn how this whole system operates. I think a lot of people really don’t understand how all these pieces fit together. I guess that was one of the things that, as I was writing the story, I kept trying to remind myself was this is not a science story. This is a story about a system and what this system has done and how this system is being threatened. In many ways, that was the biggest challenge of this piece was to not turn it into a science story because there’s a lot of science here. Yeah.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. You could go down a lot of rabbit holes, a lot of fun rabbit holes.
Jonathan Mahler: Yeah, and you get caught up in it. Science is exciting and really interesting when you start to talk about it, but that’s sort of a different story.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah,. Yeah, you’re preaching the choir here with that. That’s like my whole life at The Cancer Letter is like, “Cool science. Cool science.” No, that’s wonderful. That’s really wonderful. Well, thank you so much. We’re so happy to see that there is this coverage of this really important thing. Like you said, I’m so grateful that more lay audience and more general audience is going to see behind the curtain and see how this actually works. Because even I am not a PhD or anything, but I did biological cancer research before this, and even trainees, junior level researchers are not aware of this. Speaking from personal experience at least, not speaking for everyone.
Jonathan Mahler: Wow. Yeah.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a big thing to have more people exposed to how progress actually gets done gets me. It was wonderful.
Jonathan Mahler: Well, thank you guys, too, because I will say The Cancer Letter was… Especially in the first six weeks or so of my research, literally I read all of your back issues, back to the inauguration.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s so funny you said that you had a lot to learn. I felt like drinking from a water hose just trying to keep up with it as it was happening. Imagine doing that in a compressed period. I applaud you.
Jonathan Mahler: As Paul knows from my… I’m sure my first interview with him, I was like, “Yeah, can you explain how this whole thing works to me?”
Jacquelyn Cobb: That is what he does. He did it for me too.
Jonathan Mahler: Well, thank you guys so much.
Paul Goldberg: All right. Thank you.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Thank you for joining us on The Cancer Letter Podcast, where we explore the stories shaping the future of oncology. For more in-depth reporting and analysis, visit us at cancerletter.com with over 200 site license subscriptions you may already have access through your workplace. If you found this episode valuable, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and share. Together, we’ll keep the conversation going.
Paul Goldberg: Until next time, stay informed, stay engaged, and thank you for listening.
