BigThink.com launches breakthroughs: Discussion highlighting cutting-edge cancer research

Everyone knows someone that has been touched by cancer. Over one and a half million Americans will be diagnosed with some form of cancer in 2011, and more than 560,000 will die from the disease, accounting for 1 out of every 5 deaths.

BigThink.com has released Breakthroughs: Cancer, the third and final installment of its ongoing Breakthroughs series featured on the global forum.

Surgical Oncologist and Medical Director of Indiana University Health Goshen Center for Cancer Care, Dr. Doug Schwartzentruber, is a featured member of the panel. The discussion features a lively debate between top luminaries from the field of cancer research, including Dr. Schwartzentruber, Dr. Harold Varmus, Director of the National Cancer Institute, and Dr. Deborah Schrag, Medical Oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

“This was a wonderful opportunity and I am honored to have been invited to participate and have the chance to talk with these thought leaders in cancer,” said Schwartzentruber.

Throughout the panel discussion, moderated by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University, Big Think's guest experts explore how the unlocking of the human and cancer genomes has brought us to the dawn of a new era in cancer research. Over the next four weeks, Big Think will look at the latest thinking and research about the causes and progression of cancer, using information from this panel discussion to analyze new information about predisposition to the disease and what might be done to prevent it.

Produced by Big Think and made possible by Pfizer, Breakthroughs is a three-part series that focuses on leading-edge medical research. The previous two installments focused on Alzheimer's disease and autism.

For more information regarding the participants in Big Think's Breakthroughs: Cancer panel, please see the brief bios of the experts below.

• Dr. Harold Varmus, Director of the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Varmus won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1989 for discovering the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes.
• Dr. Doug Schwartzentruber, Surgical Oncologist and Medical Director at IU Health Goshen Center for Cancer Care. Time magazine ranked Dr. Schwartzentruber as one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2010.
• Dr. Deborah Schrag, Medical Oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Dr. Schrag is also an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
• Dr. Lewis Cantley, Professor of cell biology at Harvard Medical School. His discovery and study of the enzyme PI-3-kinase have proved highly influential for cancer research.
• This panel was moderated by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University. Dr. Mukherjee is the author of "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer," which was nominated as a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

All of the videos released in Breakthroughs: Cancer are available for media outlets, cancer organizations, and the public-at-large to embed around the web, but Big Think kindly requests that anyone re-publishing the videos provide a link back to the remainder of the series at http:bigthink.com/series65

The views expressed here are solely those of the participants, and do not represent the views of Big Think or its sponsors. Big Think is a global knowledge forum that showcases the cutting-edge ideas of leading experts across variety of fields. Big Think has interviewed over 1,500 thought leaders, including economists Paul Krugman and Muhammad Yunas, futurist Ray Kurzweil, biologists Rickard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson, Paul Nurse and Anthony Fauci, filmmaker Ken Burns, novelists John Irving and Paul Auster, business leaders Azim Premji and Richard Branson, investors Peter Thiel and George Soros, journalists Arianna Huffington and David Remnick, US Poet Laureates Billy Collins and Rita Dove, US senators John McCain and the late Ted Kennedy, particle physicists Freeman Dyson and Michio Kaku, and artists Chuck Close and Jules Feiffer. For more information regarding Big Think or its Breakthroughs series, please contact Andrew Dermont at [email protected] or 212-242-0617.