'The Personal Toll of Battling Cancer', Author & Oncologist, Dr. Azra Raza

0:09Jawad MirWelcome back everyone to another episode of the Name of Dreams podcast, the making of stories. I'm your host Jawad Mir. Today I have something a little different, not film related, but definitely story related. A story of a very resilient woman, a doctor, an oncologist, Dr. Azra Raza, who is a poet, who has gone through some incredible tough times and is out on a journey to find cure for cancer. Her story is very personal, a lot of things that she went through life, which I won't talk about. I'll let the conversation unfold. So without further ado, here is my conversation with Dr. Azra Raza. Well, let's, let's talk about poetry. What got into you... Got you into poetry or do poetry?

0:51Dr. Azra RazaI think initially because the way I grew up in Pakistan, my parents who had migrated from Lucknow, my father from Lucknow, my mother from Aligarh, and they landed in Pakistan in 1947, 14th of August. And they were seeped in that culture where poetry is not something that belongs to bookshelves in libraries, but it is a part of your every conversation.

1:19Dr. Azra RazaIt's your table talk. Everything is, informed by some great classical poet, giving their verdict on whatever is under discussion. And so growing up in that atmosphere, and secondly, my parents suffered from an immigrant's anxiety, I suspect, because they were so kind of, stunned by having come from hundreds of years of a courtesy culture and landing into the desert of Sindh, which had its own culture. I'm not saying they didn't, but it was just foreign to them, and they didn't know what to make of it. And, they were very anxious to pass on some of their age-old, as I said, courtesy culture, Tehzeeb, to their children. And I think we, the children, benefited from it because part of that tradition is an oral tradition. So you memorize tons of poetry, and then you learn to use it appropriately at the right time, because what a poet can say in 25 words or less can really contain macrocosms of meaning.

2:27Dr. Azra RazaAnd so I was made to memorize hundreds of verses since I could speak, and that at one point was simply being able to recite them back and get some applause for it in little family gatherings. But once you grow up and start to understand a little meaning of Ghalib and Anees and Josh and Mir, then you have no choice, Jawad, but to look deeper into it. That's what happened to me.

2:59Jawad MirWas there a particular poem or a verse that sticks out more from your early years that you... That sort of defines who you are today in a way? Because it has such deep meanings, right? Poetry, like something that you can connect to instantaneously. Like I know for me there's a couple of, songs written by Javed Akhtar that I've... I can think about in an instant that kind of drew me there. And not to your level, but if that's something that you can remember, I would love to hear that.

3:34Dr. Azra RazaI would say that not, poetry that I grew up with, but with life, I have dedicated my entire life to trying to cure cancer, Jawad, and I haven't. So when I think about my life and see the sea of disappointments and, lost opportunities and vanishing options and what I haven't been able to do for my patients, there is a couple of couplets that I think could summarize my whole life, and it's my contemporary poet, Shehryar. What I was striving for, I did not achieve. For my... For me, it was cancer.

4:35Dr. Azra RazaBut in that walk, in that journey, I saw the whole world. I experienced a universe. And the second sher is even more evocative for me because it's exactly why someone like me, who hasn't attained what I set out to attain, and yet continues to go on. I didn't begin to question my goal and start insulting you. Nor did I question my own dedication, my own devotion, how much I had put into this. Such a beautiful line.

5:26Jawad MirYeah.

5:28Dr. Azra RazaSo begin with Love and passion and your object of desire demands a certain level of unconditional devotion. You should not expect anything back from it, and you must continue because if you don't, then you... If you're expecting things back in return, if you are expecting success… Then that moment of gratification you're fighting for becomes useless. In other words, it's the journey that matters, and the Buddhists have said it thousands of years ago that the zen you find on top of the mountain is the zen you brought with yourself. It's that journey that matters, not that mountaintop.

6:31Jawad MirI couldn't agree with you more, and I have had mostly people on this podcast talk about movies, right? But one of the things that I keep saying, to a lot of people on the podcast, but I've also always believed for the last good over a decade, is that having a purpose… And when you have a purpose, you'll have passion for that purpose, and when you have passion and love for that purpose, you will produce results, whether it's changing the world or changing one person in the world. And that itself is the biggest success you can have because when you start expecting, you know, money, which is fine, I understand that's how the money goes. Grow… you need money to move around the world. But that gratification, you don't remember how much money you made 20 years ago. You remember the life experiences and the memories, that you still have them with you.

7:24Dr. Azra RazaWell said.

7:25Jawad MirAnd that's what, that's what matters the most.

7:27Dr. Azra RazaWell said. I'd add one thing, one more thing to it. I couldn't agree more with you, Jawad, and someone young like you having these insights, it's wonderful. I'd just add one more thing, that the other moment of gratification in this journey is the insight you develop in your own self through these experiences, through the journey.

7:49Jawad Mir100%. It's so, it's so true. And in life, you know, there's poetry and then obviously the verses that you read are about struggle and discovering yourself and gratitude and all that. What if y… Well, obviously, your book, which is about cancer and how y… your husband, was, passed away due to leukemia. If we can… I don't wanna bring you back into down the memory lane in a, in a deep and emotional way, but if you're comfortable sharing the beginning of that journey of when it all started with your husband and…

8:33Jawad Mir... What you had to go through to be able to be where you are today.

8:37Dr. Azra RazaYeah. Well, I think you did a great job by starting with poetry because it put us in that kind of a mood, where we can talk about cancer not through the prism of facts and statistics and all the horrors…

8:52Jawad MirOf course

8:53Dr. Azra Raza... But rather from the anguish that, from the prism of human anguish, of what the patient…

9:01Jawad MirPlease

9:01Dr. Azra Raza... Is going through, what the family is going through. And that is the title of my book, The First Cell and the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last. That is what, basically compelled me to write the book eventually, after so many years of practicing oncology, is because the human cost is becoming worse and worse with time, with less and less, benefit to the patients. And it is something that takes me back to where I started in the journey as a teenager. I read about cancer. I discover that within our body, we give birth to a cell that can live forever. And then not only that, cells are supposed to follow rules. Cancer cells don't follow rules. For example, one rule is that if you're born in the liver as a cell, you stay a liver cell. If you're born in the pancreas, you stay in the pancreas. But in one condition, cancer, they walk out of their organs of origin.

10:04Dr. Azra RazaA lung cancer ends up in the brain. An ovarian cancer ends up in the liver. Why? So it was an intellectual fascination to begin with about asking these two questions. How does a cancer cell become immortal, live forever? Because once we can unlock that secret, we could unlock the secret of aging, I figured. And secondly, the fact that it requires mobility. So here's a cell that in one giant leap can do both things, become immortal and become mobile. How is that happening? So this was an intellectual fascination, but because in Pakistan, where I was growing up, there were no PhD programs available in molecular biology, things I wanted to do, so and my only entry into science was through medical school. And entering med school as a third-year student, I then met my second love, which is I saw the first cancer patient, and the grotesque nature of that disease was so horrifying to me that it became instantly apparent that, yes, questioning and being curious about scientific, issues that I'd been thinking about is one thing, but now the rest of my life has to be devoted to trying to reduce the suffering of cancer patients.

11:31Dr. Azra RazaAnd so with… when you combine an emotional kind of investment with the int… intellectual obsession that you already had, that's what become the quest. And for me, curing cancer beco… became a quest. And I'm not afraid to say the word curing cancer, because a lot of people don't even talk about cure. They're just improving survival, improving this, that. I mean, that's… for me, it's always been about, that ultimate answer and a compassionate, patient-centric answer.

12:08Jawad MirAnd now you have this obsession that's attached to your intellectual sense, and you're on this journey. You know, how old were you, if you don't mind me asking, back then when you realized this? This is in the '80s or '90s?

12:26Dr. Azra RazaWell, I was a teenager when I started my…

12:29Jawad MirOkay

12:29Dr. Azra Raza... Intellectual interest in cancer, and still a teenager when I started med school, but, and met my first patient. But the obsession kept growing, Jawad, and I mean, those were my two platonic loves. I was in the idea… I was in love with the idea of, solving a mystery. And then, the third love that happened to me was actual flesh and blood love. I fell in love with a man and that can also kill if it remains unrequited, just like cancer. It's as bad if you really fall in love.

13:09Dr. Azra RazaBut fortunately, mine ended happily, and I did get married and, we had a wonderful life. And then all three of these things that were basically my three obsessions got, kind of chaotically and, in a complexity when, Harvey, my husband, developed, cancer himself. And even though I had been taking care of cancer patients for twenty years, even then I had not realized how painful a disease it can be until I shared a bed with a cancer patient. Our daughter was only four years old, so it was a very difficult time for me to be a mother of a young child and an oncologist to my own husband. And of course, after a practically five year or five-year-long battle, he died. And the issue was that he had already had one solid cancer when he was thirty-four, and at fifty-seven he gets a second one and dies.

14:19Dr. Azra RazaThe second cancer is a leukemia, unrelated. And this is precisely the question I had been asking myself, that why are patients who get one cancer more prone to developing a second cancer? Do you know that twenty percent of all new cases that are diagnosed, twenty percent, one in five, are diagnosed in a cancer survivor? It's not like it's a relapse or recurrence of their disease. It is a new cancer. Like my husband had a solid cancer, then he develops a leukemia twenty years, twenty-five years later. So the questions were… And I had been spending my life trying to find a cure for cancer, which became very apparent to me is not going to come from treatment.

15:22Dr. Azra RazaBecause you see, Jawad, the problem is that a cancer cell… Cancer happens in one cell. As soon as that cell divides into two, those two cells are not exactly alike because the DNA polymerase can make copying errors of the DNA, so there can be a few new mutations in one and the same old ones in the second. So those kinds of things, and then each of those will divide into two, so the complexity keeps increasing. And by the time we diagnose cancer, it has gone through a million of such divisions already.

16:01Dr. Azra RazaSo think of the com… of the minor changes that are occurring. So it's not… cancer is not just one disease that you're treating anymore. It's thousands of these multiple cells and their little populations, these sub-clones of them. So the complexity is such that cancer will always be a step ahead of our treatment strategies, unless we can cut them out, like solid tumors.

16:27Dr. Azra RazaIf you cut them out, you cure it. But so…

16:31Jawad MirRight. Yeah

16:33Dr. Azra Raza... The idea was, only way we can… the only good news we give our cancer patients is, "Hey, we found it early, so we can cure you." And that meant that if you take this to its logical extension is that shouldn't you be working to find cancer as early as possible? In other words, don't wait for cancer to find you. You go and find cancer before it finds you. So how do you do that? And I'm so glad you have me on this podcast because most, recently, after a ten-year, collaboration, our biomedical engineers at Columbia have come up with the solution. I've been working with them and I wanna show you the solution.

17:21Jawad MirSure.

17:21Dr. Azra RazaThis is the cure for cancer. And what I'm holding is a syringe and a needle. The cure is not in the syringe. There's no drug in there. The cure is in the needle. What could be in the needle? In the needle is a stent, you know, like a coronary stent that we…

17:41Dr. Azra Raza... Millions of people are walking around with. That's exactly what this is, a stent, except it has been fabricated with some electronic circuitry, and a little chip has been built into the stent, and this stent can be put into an arm vein here. And by producing an electrical current in the blood vessel where it's inserted, it can detect every cell that is passing through it and record it on the chip that is built into the stent and send that information to a cloud above your head. And that information, imagine millions and millions of cells are passing per second through the stent. And depending upon the size of the cell, each will create a signal because the cell, as it's going through the electrical current, will cause impedance of the current. And if the cell is small, the signal will be small. If the cell is large, signal will be large.

18:42Dr. Azra RazaAnd the first cancer cell is a very large cell, we think. So as it's going through, it can be detected. Not only detected, the stent can be programmed to electrocute it on the spot. So you see, this stent can screen the entire five liters of blood in our body every 18 days continuously from birth to death. This is the kind of solution that I've been working towards for all my life, and finally, I see the light at the end of the tunnel. And this is the work of two brilliant biomedical engineers, Sam Sheppard, Sam Sia and Ken Shepherd at Columbia University. I've been working with them for many years because they are building this stent. Over $50 million of grant monies have gone into building this stent, and 10 years of work.

19:42Dr. Azra RazaThese things don't happen overnight, right?

19:45Jawad MirRight.

19:45Dr. Azra RazaSo this is worth $50 million, this little thing in the needle. But the point is, they have the stent. What should they detect in it? And that's where I come in, that I have been saving samples of blood and marrow and biopsies and saliva on my patients since 1984 to now, and I have the largest tissue repository in the world on this kind of disease. 60,000 samples on thousands of patients longitudinally obtained, so from pre-leukemia to acute leukemia, so you can trace the cells back all the way to the first start of the thing. And that's where I come in, that through the stent, what do you detect? Well, you detect the things that I'm gonna be showing, that this is what you need to detect. So it's such a wonderful collaboration because in the end, science... Art can be "I." You can... I don't know about film. It's also not "I," but art in terms of a painting, Van Gogh could stand and paint The Starry Night by himself.

20:52Jawad MirYeah.

20:52Dr. Azra RazaBut science is we. We have to work together from different disciplines, and I think film is a good example. You are a filmmaker. You can't make a film by yourself. You need… ... Like, teams and teams of people with different areas of expertise and bringing them together and all that. So imagine doing just that for trying to cure cancer. We have to have AI experts who are coming up with all the analytics by which these petabytes of data have to be continuously analyzed, and then as the first giant cells are detected, send warning signals to basically your cell phone that, "Hey, there's something going on here. We have to alert you." But imagine the number of disciplines that have to work together to bring this kind of thing to the bedside.

21:45Jawad Mir100%. No, thank you for sharing such a valuable insight. I wanted to go back to your, and I will come back to this. You know, you had this obsession about curing cancer long before you met your husband or long before you even had cancer. And do you feel that, and I'm, I'm trying to ask something personal, so if it's too much, please feel free to not answer. Do you feel that you were being prepared by the universe or God or whatever anybody believes in to be able to deal with that later in your life? And second part of that question is, when you did find out your husband had cancer and then he passed away, at any point or even now, do you sometimes say, "You know what? I wish I had found the cure before something happened to him"?

22:41Dr. Azra RazaYou know, I would have been hesitant to answer personal questions until six years ago when I wrote my book because I had never spoken about Harvey, his illness, whatever. But then when I started writing the stories of my patients in such granular detail, I felt it was insincere to hold back on mine, as if mine was worth protecting and keeping private…

23:06Dr. Azra Raza... But theirs is not. And that's what forced me to then come out and start writing about Harvey. But if you've read the book, you'll notice then that becomes like a red line going through every chapter because that is my personal journey then. So nothing in this universe had prepared me for what happened. Nothing. I must say it was a com… it was a dread always because he had a cancer at 34 years of age, and it took many years for him to get over that fact that, "Okay, now I've survived. I can have a proper life, et cetera." And just about the time when he was being lulled into a complacency, the second cancer hit, and already in that time, I had been studying and trying to collect samples on people who had one cancer in order to find the first cell of the second cancer.

24:07Dr. Azra RazaIn other words, I was already studying cancer survivors. And you asked me whether after Harvey died, would I have I thought about, "I wish I had found this earlier"?

24:20Jawad MirOkay.

24:20Dr. Azra RazaAnd this is what I was working for. If I had found it earlier, then he would never have died of the second cancer. So it is precisely what is on my 3:00 AM agenda all the time, that how I failed him.

24:41Jawad MirI wouldn't say you failed him. But, you know, it's, it i… it is a tough thing. So I know somebody who went through that, and, it's, it's, it's, it's something that you do feel responsible for, but at the end of the day, you're not, right? And at the... At least it's not like you've given up on this track. If anything, again, I am just, I'm, maybe I'm being a little too philosophical, is that maybe this journey of yours, that you're on, maybe you wouldn't have found this solution had that not happened, God forbid, right? So again, I'm not being, di… telling, saying that's how it is, I'm just kind of playing at a, at a higher level, just trying to figure it out. But at the end of the day, it's motivated you more. But what I would love to know, and again, I'm going at a personal place, what was your husband like?

25:44Jawad MirForget cancer, forget everything else. As a human being and your relationship with him, and what ma… what made y… How did he make you laugh? And just trying to sort of an ode to him in this little part of the question.

25:59Dr. Azra RazaMy advice to my daughter is always, "Never marry someone you can live with." "Only marry someone you can't live without." There's a big difference between the two. If you can just live with someone, but then the problem of marriage is that it's such an intimate relationship that unless you're illogically obsessed by the person, everything they do will start annoying the hell out of you. So asking me is the wrong person to ask, because I was, I was blinded, and hard for me to say. But I thi… I mean, he was the head of the cancer center. He was my mentor. He was the greatest oncologist I met, and he taught me everything in oncology that I knew. So I have to say I greatly admired him intellectually as well. But despite his amazing strengths that, as a man, he had, and for example, when he had cancer and was going through such a tormented time, that if I would ever cry about it, he would protect me and console me and say, "Look, it's the luck of the draw.

27:14Dr. Azra RazaDon't worry about what I'm going through. We have to take care of our little child." and the one thing he always said was, "Look, I don't expect any good ending for this. There is no hope for me. I am going to die. But I'm a man, and a man is responsible for himself." And the stoicism and the poise with which he showed and endured all the tortures that were visited upon him is exactly the nobility that we should all be seeking. And yet, this man was so sensitive that our daughter, Sheherazade, had a… severe asthma. So once as a very little child, we had ended up in the emergency room, and she barely could breathe, and we were giving her nebulizer treatment after treatment, and just walking back and forth all night with her in our arms, taking turns.

28:25Dr. Azra RazaFinally, at, like, 5:00 AM, she started to breathe a little better and went to sleep, and as soon as she did, Javi said, "Come out with me for a second." We went out into this early morning in Chicago, like 5:00 AM, and y… you know, what he said to me was so moving still to me. He said, "If something happens to her, I'm going to kill myself." I said, "Well, that's great. W… what kind of solace is that or consolation is that supposed to bring me?" He said, "No." He said, "No, you know why I'm saying that? Why I'll kill myself if some… if she, if something happens to her?" He said, "Because if those fundamentalists are right and there is a life after death, then I don't want the little one to be alone."

29:23Jawad MirWow. Wow. That's, that's... I don't think I've heard anybody ever say that before. You know, you always talk about the afterlife and meeting your creator and all that, but never in that sense.

29:44Dr. Azra RazaYeah.

29:46Jawad MirThanks for sharing that. How did you guys meet?

29:49Dr. Azra RazaAt work. I mean, that was it. I was 24, and I had, arrived in the US, but there were six months before I could start my residency in medicine. I was so panicked, Jawad, that in these six months, somebody is going to cure cancer, and I'll be left behind. So I showed up at Roswell Park Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York and said, "Please, take me and let, make me do anything. I'm, I just have to be involved." So they, started... They had a job, a fellowship available in pediatric oncology. So I started a fellowship before I did my residency in pediatric oncology. But, three months later, they kicked me out, not because I was stupid or anything, but because I was crying the whole time. And I was crying because I couldn't sit on little two-year-olds and push bone marrow needles into them and draw spinal fluid from them and torture them with chemotherapy, and the amount of vomiting, watching these little babies, it was just torture.

30:58Dr. Azra RazaSo I was crying the whole time, and they said, "Look, you can't last here," and they pushed me into adult oncology. And that's where Harvey was the head of the leukemia service, and he was attending on the floor when I started, and that's how we started working together. But one thing I realized, Jawad, as soon as I went from pediatric oncology to adult oncology, something occurred to me immediately that the very drugs we were using, three, four drug combination, to cure a childhood leukemia had no effect in the adult leukemia. Now, the disease was not different, but the hosts bearing the disease were very different because the rest of the body of a two-year-old or a four-year-old is literally virgin cells, whereas a 70-year-old, every cell in that body has seen 1,000 cuts already.

31:58Dr. Azra RazaSo the way the two cells in the two bodies metabolize the drugs we are giving them is totally different. So the same disease for which you have a cure in childhood…

32:09Jawad MirDoesn't relate, yeah

32:10Dr. Azra Raza... Nothing in adult. When that realization came to me, I realized something very clearly that if even a childhood littler version of ourselves cannot serve as a model to study the adult disease, how can we use animals as models to study a human disease? How are we going to cure a mouse and then think that drug will work in a human?

32:38Dr. Azra RazaWhen that doesn't work from childhood to adult. And that's when…

32:44Jawad MirThat's interesting

32:44Dr. Azra Raza... I became completely against creating any artificial models in vitro in the labs, in animals to study cancer, and I said, "We have to study humans." So how do you study humans? Well, you need human cells. That's why back in 1984, as a very young person, I started banking samples, and have continued to… I've continued to do this all along so that now I have the largest tissue repository of cells. And now in the age of AI, what is needed? Data. AI needs data. AI needs human data, not animal data. Doesn't work, because 95% of experimental therapies we are developing today for cancer, today, 95% fail, and the 5% that succeed, in my opinion, should have failed because they're not curing people, they're improving survival by months.

33:45Dr. Azra RazaSo AI needs data, and very few people have access to that data. They started collecting samples now, but I've been collecting… I have that retrospective data, not just samples, but the clinical data that goes with it. Why did one person survive with a pre-leukemia for 10 years before developing leukemia and the other died within six months of leukemia? I have all those samples going backwards. So now AI needs me badly and my samples badly. So I am very hopeful that the kind of technology I just shared with you, the biomedical engineering fields of our engineers, Sam and Ken, combined with the kind of things that AI… miracles that it's creating. Can I give you one example of an AI?

34:41Jawad MirPlease. Please.

34:43Dr. Azra RazaI always have ChatGPT open next to me in my computer. Whatever I'm doing, I am constantly assisted by that. The weird thing, Jawad, is that it learns about you, so it treats me like it has known me forever.

35:00Jawad MirYeah.

35:00Dr. Azra RazaSo let me give you one example. The other day, I put into a question ChatGPT and I said, "Look, I have a patient A and a patient B. They have the same disease. I gave them this treatment. It worked in patient A, it didn't work in patient B. Give me the reasons why." It gave me the reasons in a very beautiful... You know, I mean, I've been thinking about those issues forever, so I knew most of them. It kept giving me the reasons, "In A, this happened. In B, that happened," et cetera. And then… But then it… in the end it says, "But Azra, wouldn't it have been the best approach instead of these treatments for both A and B, who started with pre-leukemia and developed leukemia and one responded and one didn't? Wouldn't it have been great if you had put in your Stentinel in them?" I was so shocked because we have never published this work.

36:04Dr. Azra RazaIt has no way of knowing. The only way it knew is because I was applying for a grant for the Stentinel, and I had put in the grant into AI to say, "Take out all the grammatical errors," and…

36:18Jawad MirYeah

36:18Dr. Azra Raza... You know, I'm passing it through AI.

36:20Jawad MirYeah.

36:20Dr. Azra RazaAnd it learned about the Stentinel. And…

36:23Jawad MirThat's crazy

36:23Dr. Azra Raza... Five months later, five months later, it brings up the Stentinel to me and says, "Wouldn't it have been better?" I mean Give me…

36:35Jawad MirThat is crazy. No, it's, it's, it's true. I… I've noticed that too, not to that level, but if I asked... You know how you can start different chats, right, in ChatGPT? And it... If I mention a certain keyword that I had mentioned maybe a month ago, it will automatically pick up that I'm talking about that conversation…

37:01Dr. Azra RazaYes

37:01Jawad Mir... Right?

37:01Dr. Azra RazaYeah, that's exactly what it…

37:02Jawad MirSo that's, that's fascinating, but yours is, like, another level. But, you know, what I would love, again, I'm all for ears about the technical stuff, which I think is fantastic, but to me, as a storyteller, I'm always more about the human condition and the human stories. A… and I go back to that all the time. You know, your husband passes away, and you're left with a five-year-old daughter or four-year-old?

37:29Dr. Azra RazaShe was four when he was diagnosed and eight something when he died…

37:33Jawad MirEight

37:33Dr. Azra Raza... Four and a half years later.

37:35Jawad MirDoes she remember seeing that? I mean, at four you're more conscious, I would imagine, and she... And then seeing him through that pain, and then obviously at eight, I think you would know that you've lost, you know, your father. What, again, it's a very cliche question to ask. I would just like to, for you to talk about that experience of how difficult was it to deal with all that for you and for her.

38:06Dr. Azra RazaFirst, I want to tell you one background because

38:08Jawad MirPlease

38:09Dr. Azra Raza... Even before I had, I became pregnant, long before, couple of years before that, I was sent the PhD thesis of somebody at Hopkins, and, in English literature. And, I read it, and basically the... It was later published as a book, Women's Body, Women's Word by Fadwa Malty Douglas. And the thesis, the hypothesis was that Scheherazade, who is the protagonist in A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, is the first real feminist in the Arab world. And the idea was that, you know, the story is, of course, well-known. Prince Shahryar comes home from a hunt and finds his wife, the queen, committing adultery with the slave. He beheads them both, but his anger is not assuaged.

39:12Dr. Azra RazaSo he's so angry at women in general, he gets one young girl picked up every night, and he ravishes them and then beheads them in the morning. So hundreds of girls were losing their lives this way. And Scheherazade, who was the daughter of the vizier, conspires with her father and her sister, Dunyazad, to be picked up by Shahryar. And he ravishes her. And then in the morning when he's about to behead her, she says, "Well, be… there's some time to, the azan. Why don't I tell you a story?" And he says, "Okay, tell me a story." So she starts telling the story that then lasts 1,001 nights, at the end of which he marries her. They have three kids already, et cetera, et cetera. So the whole story is very interesting in that Scheherazade depended upon her storytelling power to save the lives of her sisters.

40:10Dr. Azra RazaAnd after reading this, I said to Harvey, "If I ever have a daughter, I'm going to name her Scheherazade and give her a purpose in life, that she has to tell stories that will save the lives of her sisters and work for women's causes all over the world." And Harvey's response was, "Well, I can't imagine your daughter being married, being named Mary or Jane, so Scheherazade at least has some name recognition." So her name was decided way before I actually had her. And she…

40:44Jawad MirWow, what a great story.

40:45Dr. Azra RazaYeah. And then she comes along, and what happened, Jawad, is that when Harvey go… got cancer, and she was so little, his one thing was that there are so many studies to show that if a parent dies by the time the child is nine year old, then their psyche is not permanently damaged. So he would say, "I have to do everything to somehow survive till she's nine years old," because he was a true scientist…

41:17Dr. Azra Raza... And believed the studies, and he said it would really help her. And imagine now that from four to eight and a half, he spent every moment he could with her, making batteries at home, doing... He constructed little labs for her because he was such a scientist. He was doing all these magnetic fields, creating,.. We took her to Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago twice a day sometimes, every day teaching her about animals. He was obsessed with language in animals. So that kind of thing. I mean, he spent so much time with her that she had literally him as a single parent for those years, because I was doing all the other things.

42:05Dr. Azra RazaAnd Harvey wanted to be home so much that most of the treatment that I could, I would give him at home. Sometimes, I mean, he would be walking around with IV poles at home. And so many times he was admitted to ICU and in hospital and then come home. Of course, we never took Scheherazade to see him in the hospital, but she grew up seeing him being sick and being treated, and somehow accepted it as a norm. Because she was so young.

42:37Dr. Azra RazaBut then spending all that time with him in such a concentrated way, and once he died, all those memories become etched in your brain. So a normal child may not remember what life was like between four and eight and a half years of age with their father because…

42:55Dr. Azra Raza... Nothing monumental was happening afterwards to make them remember all the things over and over. But they become tattooed on your cerebrum if something like this happens. So when you ask me, does she remember it? Well, since she was born, we had been telling her that her job is to tell stories, her job is to save lives and work for feminist causes. And then spending so much concentrated time with Harvey, doing so many fun things with him also all the time, she remembers so many things that I have forgotten. And let me give you one last story about this, and then I'll shut up. Once when she…

43:37Jawad MirNo, you're fine

43:38Dr. Azra Raza... When she was, like, six or so, Harvey asked her, "Well, Shaher, what do you wanna be when you grow up?" Now, remember, Harvey was the head of the cancer center in Chicago at the university. He was a big deal, I mean, he was a internationally recognized oncologist. So she s… he says, "What do you wanna be when you grow up?" And her response was, "Well, Dad, I don't wanna be like you, for sure, because you're too serious. I wanna be like my mom." I was feeling very happy about this, very good. I looked at Harvey very triumphantly. But listen to how, what she ended this sentence with. She goes, "I don't wanna be like you, Dad, because you're too serious. I wanna be like my mom, a little dumb."

44:32Dr. Azra RazaI was so shocked by that. But anyway, well, she was too little at the time. When she grew up, of course, we kept telling this story back and forth. So when she was a bit older, I asked her, "Shaherzad, what were you thinking of when you said that, 'I wanna be like my mom, a little dumb'"? You know what her response was? She goes, "Hey, don't blame me. This is the stereotype I was growing up with. It didn't matter what my storyline is at home. But outside, the stereotype was always Dad's serious and Mom's a little dumb. And so I was just parroting what I was seeing." And that really made an impression on me, Jawad, because no matter how we try to raise our children in the comfort of our nuclear family and cozy little home, we can't protect them from the world outside. They are going to be exposed to whatever stereotypes exist. So if you really want to change your child, home is not enough.

45:34Dr. Azra RazaYou have to affect the community.

45:37Jawad MirYeah.

45:37Dr. Azra RazaYou have to make the change you want to make at home out there. And this became, like, an important moment for both Shaher and me to realize how important it is that her mission must remain that, to change the community, and not concentrate so much on yourself, but on what the community is like.

46:06Jawad MirAnd is she doing that right now? Like, I mean, how is she…

46:08Dr. Azra RazaAbsolutely

46:09Jawad Mir... How is she doing that? I would love to know.

46:12Dr. Azra RazaWell, she is telling stories, and the stories she's telling are about the people who are oppressed, who are the have-nots, who are suffering. The films, the short films she's making, everything is about that. Now, during graduate school, she had to write the scripts for two feature films. Luckily, Shaherzad has a great and wicked sense of humor also. And for kids growing up in New York City, that is, like, I call it heroine chic. It's so edgy. People like me don't even understand the language they're talking in. But the kind of stories of heartbreak that you can tell if you are sensitive to them is what she's doing.

47:05Jawad MirThat's amazing.

47:05Dr. Azra RazaSo think about a child whose entry into childhood is through cancer, the C word, which was never mentioned in her presence, but which was present all the time she was growing up, as long as her father was there. And then her entry into adulthood is when her best friend from school, after, just graduates from NYU, her best friend Andrew, not her boyfriend, because our Andrew was gay, her best friend gets an inoperable brain cancer and dies. At 22, he gets a brain cancer and dies, and Shaher is there with him every second that she can afford to be, sitting by him, watching him die slowly over 16 months. She has written the chapter number, six in my book, Andrew…

47:59Jawad MirOkay

48:00Dr. Azra Raza... Is Shaher writing about Andrew. So she's telling the stories of cancer. Right now she's making a documentary on cancer which is telling stories of patients and doctors and all the kinds of things that get involved in the enterprise of cancer. So I would say that how is she doing justice to what she's supposed to do? I haven't been able to do justice to what I am supposed to do, so how can I expect a young person, to actually be making those decisions?

48:39Jawad MirYeah.

48:39Dr. Azra RazaBut what I can guarantee you is that she's putting her heart and soul in whatever she's doing, and that, for me, is enough of a consolation that she's…

48:51Jawad MirThat is so great, and I think one of the things, I'm just gonna make a little suggestion out there. You know, she's making a documentary on cancer. I think making it more personal from where she's been through, and her mom and her dad, that is way more connecting for audiences. I'm just giving you a suggestion as a storyteller. It's her film. But that's something that I would highly recommend if she's, you know, ears to that. But I'll shut up. I'm not trying to tell Seema what to do.

49:28Dr. Azra RazaNo. That's very important advice. As you know, my whole book on cancer is actually full of stories.

49:34Jawad MirYeah.

49:34Dr. Azra RazaBegins with stories of patients, and is full of poetry. Urdu poetry.

49:40Jawad MirIs that... Yeah. Yeah, no, I know. I…

49:41Dr. Azra RazaBut the book on cancer. And so, yeah, she has a lot of storytelling power in there because that is the basis for everything, isn't it?

49:50Jawad Mir100%.

49:51Dr. Azra RazaWhat you said is so profound. So profound.

49:54Jawad MirHave you se… have you seen the movie Lorenzo's Oil?

49:58Dr. Azra RazaNo.

49:59Jawad MirI highly recommend that you watch that. It's, it's based on a true story. It's directed by George Miller, who's also a doctor. Who's made films like Mad Max, Babe, and it's basically about this kid. It stars Susan Sarandon and Nick Nolte. It's about this kid who gets this very rare disease.

50:22Dr. Azra RazaOoh.

50:22Jawad MirAnd the whole film is about them three, the father, the mother, and the caretaker, and the son, and how they cope through that. I just m… because when you were telling me all this, like, as your daughter, and your passed away husband, yourself, it just sort of connected me to that film, that how it reminded me of that. So, you might, you might, I wouldn't say enjoy it, but you would relate to it. It's a very powerful film.

50:48Dr. Azra RazaYeah. Yeah.

50:49Jawad MirVery powerful film.

50:50Dr. Azra RazaI just saw The Room Next Door, the Almodovar film.

50:54Jawad MirI haven't seen that. I gotta check that out.

50:56Dr. Azra RazaWith Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. Excellent. I mean, Almodovar is hu… is…

51:01Jawad MirYeah. I mean, they're great actresses

51:03Dr. Azra Raza... Is who he is.

51:04Jawad MirYeah.

51:04Dr. Azra RazaAnd he's a great director and storyteller. My God, I love that man. But anyway, yeah, I'll see this, for sure.

51:12Jawad MirAmazing. Well, I hope this conversation, for me, it was c… certainly riveting. Obviously there could be…

51:20Dr. Azra RazaOh, I wanna say one more thing.

51:22Jawad MirPlease.

51:22Dr. Azra RazaWhen Sheherzaad came to... She was doing some filming at Columbia, and she was filming me in a lab meeting with all my scientists sitting around, and we were talking about, you know, some of the things we talked about today, and especially…

51:38Jawad MirSure

51:38Dr. Azra Raza... This approach and all. And her, after she filmed it, she shut the camera off and she goes, "Mommy, either this is Nobel Prize material or you are Elizabeth Holmes-ing us."

51:54Jawad MirShe said that in front of everybody?

51:56Dr. Azra RazaIn front of every…

51:56Jawad MirOh, wow

51:57Dr. Azra Raza... Only a child can abuse you like this, right? You're an Elizabeth Holmes-ing.

52:04Jawad MirYeah.

52:04Dr. Azra RazaSo this is not science fiction. I wanted to end by saying this is not Elizabeth Holmes-ing. This is not science fiction. This is real. And just, I have to make this disclosure that now, there is a company, PredictRX, that, will be owning this Sentinel, and, just wanted to make that disclosure.

52:27Jawad MirOh, amazing.

52:28Dr. Azra RazaNot that I have anything to do with it. Yeah.

52:29Jawad MirYeah. No, that's, that's great. I mean, it's wonderful the, you know, I, again, curing cancer is very important, of course, but I think your personal connection to it is what drew me to it to speak to you, because there's a story. And I'm sure there's so many other things that, you know, yourself, your h… Harvey, and, your daughter have gone through. But you're still at it, and I think it kinda goes back to what we were talking about in the beginning, you know, just the Jew, and struggle, and life, and that this is what this is all about. It's all about struggling, and if you don't have struggle, life is meaningless.

53:09Dr. Azra RazaOf course. Let me end by saying this, Emily Dickinson thing. "Surgeons must be very careful when they test their knives. For underneath their fine incisions rests the culprit, life." Thank you for a wonderful hour.