Legend! Part 1 of 2: Dr Azra Raza: The First Cell, Unravelling The Mystery of Cancer.

Sep 28, 2025

Dr. Azra Raza, an oncologist and professor at Columbia University, dives deep into the complexities of cancer, drawing from her extensive experience and personal stories. She passionately advocates for early detection, emphasizing how traditional treatments often fall short. Raza critiques the stagnant progress in cancer research and highlights the need to shift focus from eliminating every cancer cell to early intervention strategies. She discusses the elusive 'first cell' in cancer development and the importance of continuous monitoring to catch it early.

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ANECDOTE

Grief Drives Purposeful Action

Dr. Azra Raza refuses to let patient deaths define them or the patients' lives.
She uses that anguish as motivation to improve cancer detection and care.

INSIGHT

Cancer As An Alien Species

Cancer acts like a new species that treats the body as hostile and seeks to survive.
Two universal cancer traits are ignoring growth inhibition and remaining immature.

INSIGHT

Minimal Progress Despite Massive Spending

Decades of research produced incremental gains but not a true cure for most cancers.
Many treatments still rely on brutal, non-specific methods like surgery and chemotherapy.

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Dr Azra Raza: The First Cell, Unravelling The Mystery of Cancer.

Few adults on the planet have not been touched, either directly or indirectly, by cancer. Cancer is one of the things many people see as an inevitable part of life that they hope and pray does not visit directly onto their own life.

Imagine for a moment the grief of being an oncologist (a cancer specialist) and the weight that would put on your life. Every day, you work with people, 70% of whom you will walk to their death. Would that make you want to quit and find a new field?

Now imagine that you are not only watching as these people die but that you discover that the love of your life, another oncologist, is diagnosed with untreatable cancer, and you must walk them through to the end.

For most of us, that would make us want to crawl into a hole and never return. Well, not for our guest, Dr. Azra Raza. Instead, she is pioneering the understanding of cancer and, most importantly, its earliest detection.

Dr. Raza immigrated to the U.S. with a clear intention: to cure cancer. She has traveled a long way from where she grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, to the dining room of President Joe Biden home at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Raza was invited with a handful of other cancer specialists to offer their perspectives on the current cancer landscape, which contributed to shaping what is now known as the "Cancer Moonshot" She has been featured in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Smithsonian, and numerous other high-profile outlets.

Dr. Raza’s latest bestselling book, "THE FIRST CELL" is a searing account of how medicine and our society (mis) treat cancer, how we can do better, and why we must. Her life is devoted to early detection and prevention of cancer.

Website https://azraraza.com Azra.rasa@columbia.edu Social Media https://twitter.com/AzraRazaMD https://www.linkedin.com/in/azra-raza-2a34a922

Part 1: The Alien Within

Refusing To Allow Any Cancer Patients to Die Twice
Roll Up Your Sleeve Research: 40-60 Patients a Week
Bidirectional Translational Research
Cancer: The Alien Within
What Are the Two Common Properties of 200 Different Cancers?
Lessons from Cancer in Immortality
A Trillion Dollars on Cancer Research, What Have We Discovered?
Why 70% Cancer's Are Cured...Is Terrible news
Beating The Dog to Death to Cure Flees
Attacking Your Field of Expertise
The Wrong Measurement of Success?
Too Old and Too Young to Change the Model
Confronting "Sunk Cost Bias"
A Hundred Million Cells at Stage 1
The Anti-Climax of Human Genome Sequencing
In Search of The First Cell
Cancer and The Aging Connection
Cancer on Walk-about

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