For the entirety of our species’ history, our approach to cancer has largely been to react, to design new therapies and better combinations of treatments. This energy has certainly been well-spent, but what if we didn’t have to use treatment at all? Or what if we could minimize the use of aggressive therapies? Prevention and screening represent two under-appreciated pillars of cancer care, and we’re using this final installment in our cancer miniseries to show some appreciation. To grasp the impact that screening and prevention can have, we also need to consider the global landscape of cancer prevalence and incidence - where is it decreasing? Where is it on the rise? Where can intervention or prevention make an impact? As we’ve shown over these four episodes, science and medicine has accumulated a wealth of information about cancer - but the striking racial and socioeconomic disparities in cancer incidence and mortality in the US and around the world demonstrates that that knowledge has not been applied equally. Any proposal to reduce the global cancer burden must address the systemic issues driving these disparities. Tune in for a thought-provoking reflection on the status of cancer today.

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A century and a half ago, the list of effective cancer treatments was essentially a single entry: surgery. Today, in 2026, you’d need pages to contain the number of treatments available, and multiple notebooks to delineate all of the various therapies currently in development. It is nothing short of a revolution. Of course, no revolution is perfect, and many cancer treatments are ineffective or carry risks of serious side effects. In part 3 of our cancer series, we delve into all facets of cancer treatment, from the history of their development to how they actually work. Tune in to learn how far we’ve come and where we might go from here in our perennial quest to treat and cure cancer.

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For centuries, physicians noticed that cancer sometimes ran in families, but until the 1960s, an answer to this mystery remained out of reach. Only then were scientists beginning to unlock the cellular dynamics underlying cancer, and what they found finally allowed grief-stricken families to put a name and explanation to their experience. It wasn’t simply bad luck. It was genetics: a heritable mutation in a key tumor suppressor gene that greatly increases the risk of developing cancer in your lifetime, a condition known as Li-Fraumeni Syndrome. Journalist Lawrence Ingrassia belongs to one of those families; he has lost his mother, three siblings, and a nephew to cancer. In this TPWKY book club episode, Ingrassia joins me to discuss his book A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery, where he weaves together his family’s story with that of the scientists who sought to uncover the cellular drivers of cancer. Tune in for a heartbreaking and inspiring journey.

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Each of our cells can become cancerous. It’s an uncomfortable, yet unavoidable truth. Nor is it a truth restricted to our species - cancer is a consequence of complex life. The features that make a cell cancerous are those that, under other circumstances, are beneficial, essential even, for an individual’s growth and survival. How is that possible? In the second installment in our series, we’re putting cancer under the microscope to consider the qualities that underlie a cancer cell’s success in our body. By placing cancer in an evolutionary framework, we can not only understand why cancer is so darn prevalent, but we can also leverage that knowledge to devise new approaches to treatment - working with evolution rather than against it. If you’ve ever wondered why we haven’t come up with a cure for all cancer or why some animals get cancer more than others, this is the episode for you.

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Cancer has touched every one of us in some capacity, and learning of a diagnosis inspires many more questions than it answers. In this four-part series on cancer, we aim to lay a foundation of knowledge that will help make sense of this multifaceted disease. We begin our four-part series on cancer by asking a deceptively simple question: what is cancer? As we’ll discover over the course of these episodes, there is not one answer but many. After all, cancer is not one disease but many. In this first episode, we examine the clinical definitions of cancer - when someone receives a cancer diagnosis, how is that determined, and what does that mean? Viewing that question through a historical lens reveals our changing understanding of cancer and how that knowledge filters into the public perception of this disease. With cancer diagnoses on the rise, it’s tempting to label cancer a disease of the 20th or 21st centuries. But is that the case? Tune in to find out.

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What happens if you put a bunch of rats in an enclosure and provision them with unlimited food and water? Researcher John B. Calhoun was committed to finding out. Results from Calhoun’s “rat utopia” experiments from the mid-20th century revealed a behavioral dark side that emerged as space grew increasingly limited, ultimately leading to complete population collapse. As headlines conveyed dire warnings about global overpopulation, Calhoun’s work served to reinforce those fears and shape our understanding of the importance of personal space. In this week’s TPWKY book club episode, Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden join me to discuss their book, Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B. Calhoun. Tune in for a fascinating a tour through Calhoun’s bizarre and influential research, which even inspired a beloved (if a little creepy) children’s book and movie, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.

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Poop is an incredibly valuable and massively underutilized resource. However, most of us don’t see it that way because of our evolutionarily ingrained disgust towards poop. Flush toilets and intricate sewer systems have revolutionized health and hygiene by whisking our poop far away where we don’t have to think about it. But that poop has gotta go somewhere, and eventually, not thinking about it isn’t going to be an option. Similarly, not thinking about our individual poop is asking for disaster, since what we produce can reveal a great deal about our gut and overall health. In this episode, we explore the problems that poop can cause on both the individual and population level. From constipation to fiber, and the Great Stink to communal poop sponges, we’re continuing our journey into the curiously fascinating world of poop.

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It might be stinky and it might be unpleasant to behold, but we all do it. For many of us, our poop is out of sight, out of mind once we flush it away. But for the next hour and fifteen minutes or so, we’re going to bring it back into mind as we delve into the rich world of poop. This episode, the first of a two-part miniseries on poop, features a wide cast of characters all with some role in the production or management of poo, like our intestinal tract with its sphincters and microbiota, dung beetles that perform the duties so crucial for ecosystem function, and the sperm whale that produces a revered substance used in perfumes. We’re going behind the scenes to understand how the sausage really gets made (in a manner of speaking) and why we need a big perspective shift to stop seeing poop as waste and start seeing it as a resource.

Correction: EW says that elephants poop 15 pounds a day, but in reality it’s more like 10x that - 150-200 pounds! Sorry for the mistake - we noticed it while listening through.

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For much of the world, refrigeration is such a commonplace technology that we rarely stop to wonder at the many ways it has transformed our lives. From the foods we grow to where we grow them, from how they taste to what we eat, refrigeration has dramatically - and quite recently - changed our relationship to food, our health, and the environment. As Nicola Twilley describes in Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves, progress, as it so often does, comes at a cost. Twilley, who also cohosts the award-winning food podcast Gastropod, joins us in this week’s TPWKY book club episode to discuss the surprising history and tenuous future of refrigeration. You’ll never look at your fridge the same way again.

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Now that we know just how critical sleep is, we’re all making sure we get the amount we need, right? Unfortunately no. One-third to one-half of Americans are not getting enough sleep, according to public health guidelines. Why is that? Hypotheses abound, but many point the finger of blame at different aspects of modern society such as screen time, artificial light, a sedentary lifestyle. These narratives suggest that sleep in industrialized societies today is not just different but worse than in centuries past. Is that the truth? How did humans sleep in yesteryear, and what can that tell us about sleep today? In the conclusion to our sleep two-parter, we explore the many ways that humans sleep and the wide array of consequences when we don’t get enough (or too much) of it.

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Sleep is a universal experience. It’s not just the lion that sleeps tonight - it’s also the butterfly, the chicken, the jellyfish, the dog, the snake, the worm, and of course the human. What is this widespread physiological process whose spell we are all under? What purpose (or purposes) does it serve? Why do we sleep the way we do? These are just some of the questions we’re going to get into in this week’s episode, the first half of our two-parter on sleep. We break down the different components of sleep in humans before diving deep into how animals sleep and what drives the different patterns we see. Night owl or daybird? Light sleeper or deep slumberer? Frequent naps or one big chunk? One eye open or both eyes closed? Tune in as we unravel some of the mysteries of sleep.

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