Host

The Garrison Institute co-founder, urban visionary and award-winning author Jonathan F.P. Rose.

Guest

Siddhartha Mukherjee is an Indian-born American physician, oncologist, and author. He is best known as the author of major nonfiction works including The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction), The Gene, and Song of the Cell. A professor of medicine at Columbia University in New York and a 1997 Rhodes Scholar, his research focuses on stem cells and cancer biology.

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Show Notes

[00:00] Jonathan FP Rose welcomes Siddhartha Mukherjee, acclaimed physician, researcher, and bestselling author of The Emperor of All Maladies, The Song of the Cell, and The Gene. The conversation sets out to explore how genes and cells reveal deep unity in nature and how this understanding can serve the common good.
[01:05] Siddhartha reflects on his upbringing in New Delhi, India, and three formative passions: music, science, and a desire to engage with the wider world. His early life shaped his lifelong curiosity about biology and the human condition.
[03:25] Jonathan and Siddhartha discuss Indian classical music and how this improvisational system mirrors biological codes. Unlike vertical genetic sequences, cells respond dynamically to context, much like a musician improvises within the context of traditional melodic structures.
[11:25] Siddhartha explains classical Mendelian inheritance (also known as vertical gene transfer), where children inherit genes from their parents, and contrasts it with horizontal gene transfer, where genes move across organisms, ecosystems, even species lines after birth. This sideways flow of information is fundamental to evolution and challenges traditional hierarchies in biology.
[17:20] Drawing parallels between biological interconnection and human societies, Jonathan and Siddhartha explore how stress signals in nature and stressors in society propagate information laterally, shaping adaptation and resilience.
[22:45] What does it mean for empathy to be foundational — not an add-on — in human life and cognition? Siddhartha shares a powerful personal reflection on how bipolar disorder temporarily erased his capacity for empathy, underscoring the fact that empathy is critical for the perception of truth and reality.
[33:20] The discussion turns to the limitations of existing words like “empathy” and “compassion” and how these words emerge from a worldview that begins with individual drives and social competition instead of collective dynamics. Siddhartha considers instead the need for new language to describe the horizontal flows of information that underlie biology, consciousness, and society, something along the lines of “empathy-reality.”
[44:09] Siddhartha discusses his medical background, outlining his team’s work using AI for drug design, emphasizing that no science is without bias, and explores how future AI systems can and should be built with empathy, compassion, and an understanding of the pain of others.
[54:35] The episode closes with a shared aspiration: imagining technologies and societies that honor interdependence, truth, and the lived realities of others — a true emotional Turing test for the human and the artificial alike.