When Professor Bryant Lin got cancer, he taught a class about it | Hacker News Reader

When Professor Bryant Lin got cancer, he taught a class about it

nytimes.com

89 pointsdanso20 comments

Non-paywall link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/us/stanford-professor-can...

I studied molecular biology 15 years ago. Recently I realized that I started to forget more and more about it, like how the rooms looked, names of professors, (obviously) a lot of the material I learned, etc.

But I can't forget about our professor of Genetics: he was suffering from lung cancer, so when he talked about cancer, it had a tremendous impact. He also used to be a smoker and was quite outspoken against that too.

>One of its priorities has been nonsmoker lung cancer, a disease that disproportionately affects Asian populations.

It's a bit odd to describe 60% of the world's population as a single ethnic group. I'd like to see an breakdown by country. Do Indians( which itself can be separated into more sub groups) have higher rates than Eastern Russians, etc.

Then again, according to this article Asia just has higher rates of lung cancer. Excluding India for some reason.

https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-news/lung-cance...

Is this genetic ? Or is industrialization to blame? "Poor" counties in Africa appear to have much lower rates( although a cynical take says this might be due to shorter average life spans as lung cancer is largely something that effects the elderly). Maybe living in a poor country where people can't afford cars nets some health benefits.

Rates of second hand smoke exposure?

It could also just be a measure of access to healthcare. If your poor and cancer gets you before you can be diagnosed it won't be reported as a cancer death.

Many hypothesis, one of my favorite, however not at all proven, is the heavy use or sautee / stir fry cooking over gas stove. That’s like second hand smoke exposure at least a few times a day

maybe it's an industrialization thing. The poor countries in Africa don't have as many factories and smog; the rich countries also don't have as many factories, but the asian countries do.

Like any terminal disease, when you hear someone in your periphery become seriously ill, you think about them, say some kind and comforting words and if religious, pray in their way for their recovery.

When you or a loved one get the bombshell news, the world flips upside down. Things you thought were important and had real impact on your life start to seem like small potatoes. It’s surreal and hard to comprehend just how abberative bad news changes your world view.

Makes me think of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Former YouTube CEO, Susan Wojcicki, was a non smoker and died from lung cancer. see https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/from-susan/

Dana Reeves, wife of actor Christopher Reeves, a non-smoker, also died from lung cancer.

Also know a non-smoker who got lung cancer, in particular a (rather rare) genetically sensitive form. Most of the damage ended up to the bones and brain versus the lungs.

It's so scary that a practical billionaire was unable to save her own life with the very best medical technology available to her. There isn't a single medical treatment she couldn't afford and yet it progressed in a way that she couldn't save herself. That is sad and sobering for the rest of us, about how out of control things can be, even in our own bodies. I'm sure her contributions to cancer research will save many millions of lives downstream in the future, however.

Another powerful read that touches similar themes to this article is the memoir When Breath Becomes Air

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25899336-when-breath-bec...

I'm starting to understand why people are willing to pay for the new york times.

to read the comments?

NYT is worth paying for and is one of the few institutions doing real journalism these days. It would be said to see if go.

I can't imagine what his wife must be going through considering she's a PM at DeepMind. It must be gut wrenching to have access to state of the art computational biology and biomedicine, and yet unable to do anything for her husband. Zero to one in biotech takes years.

Obligatory mention of Randy Pausch's Last Lecture [0].

Very inspiring.

[0] https://youtu.be/ayPMfopCe1g

Thanks!

(I detached this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43186721 so we could pin the latter to the top. Nothing at all wrong with saying thanks! I just want to save some real estate.)

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