tavis: good evening, from los angeles, i'm tavis smiley. first up tonight, a conversation about cancer and one of the most acclaimed books about the subject, "the emporer of all maladies." dr. siddhartha mukherjee is a noted cancer researcher whose best-selling book is a comprehensive look at the disease. the book was named one of the 10 best of the year by the "new york times." also tonight, emmy-winning actress roseanne barr stops by. she's out with a new book, "roseannearchy". [captioning made possible by viewers like you -- thank you] >> all i know is his name is james and he needs extra help with his reading. >> i'm james. >> to everyone making a difference. >> thank you. >> you help us all live better.

>> nationwide insurance supports tavis smiley. with every question and every answer, nationwide insurance is proud to join tavis smiley to improve financial literacy and remove obstacles to empowerment. >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. tavis: dr. siddhartha mukherjee is a cancer physician at the columbia university medical center and an assistant professor of medicine at columbia. his text on cancer has become one of the most talked about books on the subject in recent memory. the "new york times" best-seller is called, "the emporer of all maladies," a biography of

cancer. dr. mukherjee, thank you for your work and an honor to have you. >> thank you for having me. tavis: i look forward to the day when your work will be irrelevant, upnecessary. >> i do, too. i tell people i want to be out of a job. tavis: that won't happen any time soon, though, unfortunately. >> unfortunately. tavis: why not? >> because cancer is many diseases and we're just beginning to understand what drives this family of diseases, and the second reason is that for many forms of cancer, the problem lies in the vulnerability of our cells. even in an ideal world we get rid of every known carcinogen, there would still be prevalence of cancer driven by accidental causes inside each one of our cells. tavis: when we say we're fighting cancer, we're fighting ourselves? >> it's a complex story. it turns out that the very genes

that turn on in cancer cells perform vital functions in normal cells. so the very genes that allow our embryos or brains to grow, if you mutate them, if you distort them, you unleash cancer. carcinogens do this and there's a lot to be done in the world to remove agents that make these mutations happen but these mutations are also happening accidentally in our bodies so in some sense cancer is part of our inheritance. tavis: the numbers are startling. in our lifetimes, one in two men will contract some kind of cancer and one in three women will contract some kind of cancer. those numbers are arresting. >> absolutely. cancer is going to be, if it already is not, it is the defining disease of our generation. tavis: this book, "the emporer of all maladies," is the book that everybody's talking about who cares anything about -- has lost anyone to or is curious

about this thing called cancer. you dedicate the book to someone named robert sandler. i noticed that when i picked it up. robert sandler was born in 1945 and died in 1948. so robert sandler was dead at the age of 3. you dedicate the book to robert sandler and those who came before and after him. who is robert sandler? >> robert sandler is a child who died when he was 3 years old and he is a child who is the first child that we know of to be treated with chemotherapy. he was part of a cohort of children, about 12 children, in boston, who sidney farber treated with the first ever invented chemotherapies and he had a very brief remission from his leukemia. he had leukemia. and he relapsed and died soon after. when i was writing this book, i think the biggest challenge in this book is how do you take a topic like cancer and bring it

down to a human, readable level. we all need to read about it but how do you convert that and the answer, as i wrote the book, which became very obvious, was that you have to tell human stories. so the story, you know, chm chemotherapy is something we encounter in the abstract. how do you tell a story of that history so i had to find the child. i ultimately found him through a complicated series of accidents, found him, actually, not far from my parents' house in india, someone kept a photograph and i found the photograph and discovered his name and dedicated the book to him because he's a reminder of the human faith -- face behind the history. tavis: to your point about the human face behind the history. why does the history matter? what we care about i suspect most is finding a cure and saving lives that are at risk or saving lives that are not yet lost. why is the biography so important of cancer? >> the history is

the drug tamoxifen, saved hundreds of thousands of lives. the reason tamoxifen was discovered was because a scottish surgeon was walking through the highlands of scotland and overheard a shepherd saying if you take out the ovaries of sheep and cows, you change the way their breasts may behave. this is a time when no one knew the connection of ovaries and breast cancer so it was through a series of accidents that he eventually figured out there was a link between ovaries and breast cancer and it was

discovered estrogen was linked to breast cancer and from there on, an anti-estrogen, was used. such stories remind us that such accidents still happen all the time. most modern drugs for cancer are products that come up from a long history, 10, 15, 20 years, so we really have to understand the past in order to understand the future. tavis: your story makes me remember something a friend said to me years ago when i was struggling with the loss of a loved one, going through this process, and there is a point even you'll admit where medicine stops. there's only so much that we know, hence we're wrestling with cancer. my friend said there's a reason why they call it the practice of medicine. how much of this do we really know and how much is shooting in the dark when you have stats like the one we've been talking about it? >> some of it is shooting in the dark and some of it is not. i think that spectrum is changing. there were diseases, chronic

milogenous leukemia that was fatal, that disease has been converted into a disease which people take -- patients take a single medicine and their life spans may extend to 25 or 30 years. breast cancer is a great example, as well, for certain variants of breast cancer, not triple negative breast cancer, but estrogen representor positive -- receptor positive breast cancer, many patients are living 10, 15 years with that disease. so we've seen a transformation in our landscape of cancer so that's why we need to know our history and why that happened and what happens next. tavis: everybody appreciates what you have done here, that's why everybody is talking about it, the "new york times" calling it one of the best 10 books of last year. this caught me as a great description of the book. the "times" referred to you as a

passionate young priest attempting a biography of satan. that's a cold piece right there. a passionate young priest attempting the biography of satan. what gets dr. siddhartha mukherjee to want to dig into this? >> the book was inspired by questions patients have asked me. patients want to know what they're facing and what's astonishing to me is that this is a part of our lives and yet it's not a part of our history in a sense that you can go to a bookstore and see a thousand books on cancer and yet there are very few attempts to write the history of cancer. when did it firstraphy? what is it's story? how did we develop our understanding of it so the book grew from an urgency to try to understand a patient's question, which is, what am i battles and what happens next. tavis: as a physician, how do

you process that? how do you go about telling a patient what he or she might not want to know when they ask you that question? >> one of the things that you realize through training is that everything in medicine has nuance. and every conversation has meaning and it can be approached through a variety of different ways. there is no one right solution. every patient requires information in different matters. some people at any point up front. part of learning medicine, the art of medicine, the practice of medicine, as you pointed out, really involves finding out the psyche of the patient beforehand, before you tell them something, and figuring out what kinds of information will be relevant. eventually you're going to tell them the truth but there are 100 different ways of arriving at the truth and that's something you learn. it's a learned method and you learn from the master clinicians who teach you how do this in a most masterful way.

tavis: in each of our lives we have to wrestle, it seems to me, with how to navigate losing versus winning. we're not always going to win. there will be losses that will come in our lives. but that seems to me to be a bit different, dr. mukherjee, than the situation you are so often in, which is that you're losing oftentimes more than you're winning depending on the patient. but oftentimes you're losing more than winning. how does one stay motivated to do the work, whatever your vocation is, how do you stay motivated to do the work when oftentimes you're losing more than you're winning? >> part of the answer lies in rephrasing the understanding of losing and winning, of victory and loss. one of the things i talk about in the book and i trace its history is that the word "cure," the word "win," the word "war" are deeply loaded, punitive

words almost. and patients, when you don't win against cancer, you therefore are a loser. these are punitive words for patients and so i think we need to get away from this vocabulary. the head of the n.c.i. said, instead of thinking about the war on cancer in terms of be winning and losing, we should be thinking of it in terms of a puzzle. you don't win or lose a puzzle, you solve a puzzle. so that's the scientific end of things. and the last point i make is that even when patients are not getting the benefits of chemotherapy, there is not necessarily a loss in that for the doctor or the patient. there are many things you can do. you can take care of patients. there's palliative care, there's hospice. so there are many, many things that can be done to get away from the vocabulary of winning and losing. tavis: that said, there have to

be days -- you're human. you get connected to these patients and their families and their lives and you process, navigate through those deaths. how? >> well, i come back. i think about my own loved ones. i grieve, i mean, i'm human. there are days that are certainly much tougher than others. my fellowship years when often there would be patients lost in the span of a week, sometimes we would lose four, five, six, seven patients, people i knew intimately. you understand how to grieve, how to give solace. i'm human and grieving is a natural part of medicine. as a doctor, grieving is a natural part of medicine. if you deny that, you get into this trap of curing and victory. i think grief is very important. tavis: this is such a fascinating text. let me ask you this as a final

question, that is, does the history make you hopeful about the future? >> the history makes me absolutely hopeful about the future. the way that -- and you know what, the one thing that makes me most hopeful is that the history is threaded through with the stories of patients. you discover in the book the stories of patients and the stories of patients are incredibly inspiring and whenever the field of oncology got into a position where it sort of fell into a trap, it was patients and patient advocates working with doctors and scientists who resurrected that and makes me incredibly hopeful about the future. tavis: it is one of the most talked about books of the year. you have to get it, it's called "the emporer of all maladies," a biography of cancer, written by this brilliant genius, dr. siddhartha mukherjee. up next, author roseanne barr.

tavis: always pleased to welcome roseanne barr to this program. it's hard to believe that it's been over 20 years since the debut of that sitcom that made her a television icon. she's out with a provocative new book, called "roseannearchy, dispatches from the nut farm." you got to love the title. good to see you. you're rocking the red gloves. >> i am. yeah. tavis: you're working it out. >> i am. tavis: this title, "roseannearchy." how did you come up with this one? >> my boyfriend came up with it because it kind of says it all, doesn't it? that's exactly what -- it's kind of what everything's all about, kind of where i found myself in the last 18 years since -- i guess it's 15 years since i wrote another book. so it's all about questioning

the basic assumptions of everything. tavis: this photo. put the cover back up again. this cover design. i love it. >> my son came up with that idea. it's like a left-winning rush limbaugh mixed up with mao and all of them. tavis: castro. >> everybody, yeah. tavis: have you always been -- you've always been outspoken. have you always been so political? is that a fair question? >> yeah, i always have been. you know, yeah, kind of, talking about class and stuff is kind of political. and, yeah, yeah, i always was. my family always, too, for a long time back, very political. tavis: let me walk through some issues. >> o.k. you said you had to keep an open mind. tavis: when you read this book, you have to keep an open mind and it helps if you have a sense of humor. >> you act like it was an

ordeal. tavis: i loved it. i'm just saying it helps to have a sense of humor. there's so much to talk about on the american political scene today. let me start with this one first because it is so serious. what's your take on this tucson -- everybody's talking about it and the whole issue of civility, et cetera. i don't want to color the question. tell me your thoughts on tucson? >> i think when you're mixing up weapons and a lot of resentment and negative feelings towards your neighbors and you're taunting a mentally ill bunch of people, it's a recipe for disaster. i hope this is the end of that whole way of thinking. i hope americans -- i just -- you know, tavis, you know that i do pray and i do pray for americans to not let themselves be divided against each other anymore. let's not let these people do

this. they want to divide us and we need to be for something all together, all of us. we got to remember this is america. this is america. it blows my mind. this is america. we got to join up and be for good things like americans have always been for. we've always been for education and diversity. we can't turn our back now. we can't let this happen. tavis: when you say taunting the mentally ill, what do you mean by that? >> it just seems like, you know, on my blog, roseanneworld.com, i found this thing about how i felt two years ago, the mentally ill were being taunted to take action when i watched, you know, glenn beck and i got real scared and i started talking about it all the time, like, you can't be saying the president isn't an american. you can't be saying stuff like

that. it's not good. we're in a war that your friend bush started and you told us all that time we weren't supposed to talk down the president but now, come on, which is it? tavis: so are we blaming the media for this? left and right, the media, the politicians, or the people? >> i'm blaming the people at the top where the blame goes. i'm tired of it being put at the bottom by people paid off by people at the top to get people blaming the people at the bottom who have nothing to do with it. there are people at the top and they have to, like, give us a solution. now the republicans, they took over again. well, let us see some solutions now, you know, because we're going to be able to start blaming them real soon if they don't do something and now it's all gridlock. o.k. well, let's get something done. i don't care who does it, a republican or a democrat. tavis: how do you expect we'll

reasonably get anything done with a divided government? >> because the people -- as i was trying to say, because the people are going to unite and go, we're done with you robbing us and our tax moneys. the people's money, the people's public money belongs to the public. it just drives me crazy. public money belongs to the public. it's not to be divided among the rich and going to their private pockets, excuse me. it drives me crazy and i just have to say it and that's a lot of why i wrote that book but that book's funny and now you've got me all serious and i don't know what. but part of this book is serious stuff. tavis: it is. >> we can't be, we can't go down that road that other peoples have gone down where it's neighbor against neighbor. we're not going to do that here. i just pray for that. tavis: one of the things you are passionate about and funny about, you had a whole t.v. show

that made you an icon talking about this issue and i don't accept the fact that you can't mix the serious and the follow-upy, so the issue of class. you have made us laugh about the issue of class for years. it's a serious issue but you find it funny? >> it's kind of ridiculous. it's all so ridiculous. i tried to do the last year of my show about the difference -- the two americas that i've seen in my life, a working-class, near-poor one, and a real wealthy one of hollywood and stuff in it. it's two different -- it's just two different disparate -- there needs to be reconciliation, i think, between the two. tavis: the class problem in this country getting worse? >> yeah. the poor are bailing out the rich. how crazy that? talk about doesn't have any clothes, the emperor. the poor bailing out the rich and the rich are blaming the

poor for the problem. these republicans, he'll be, like, the deficit is $4 trillion for that boehner, he'll be, like, taking $150 from hungry kids and saying, hey, we're going to take care of this problem and turns that $150 over to the bankers to pay down the debt -- like to spend more money to get us out of debt. it's a scam from friggin' top to bottom, every inch of it. that's why i'm running for president as you know or may not know. tavis: i saw that. you made the announcement. >> i am. tavis: so your platform is going to be? >> outlawing the scam from top to bottom. no more b.s., just give us the facts. people are addicted to b.s. in our country right now. that's what scares me. tavis: why are we addicted to it? >> it feels so good to lie. you know that.

everybody knows it. it feels good to lie and say everything's -- but it's not. we got to get some reality in there. the only thing i'm trying to say and i do want to say before you tell me it's all over, my book, "roseannearchy," is -- i want to just say, it's a story of repentance and redemption. and i just wanted to come on your show and see if you got that out of there. did you get that from that book? tavis: i get it loud we don't want to give too much of it away. repentance about what? >> things i've done wrong. yeah, like, yeah, all that, everything. tavis: before i let you go. we're just scratching the surface on this but we should explain, when the subtitle reads "dispatches from the nut farm," there really is a nut farm. >> i think that i've been placed on earth -- this is no joke -- at this time to talk up the

benefitss and the wonders of the macadamia nut and i'm growing them and they're fantastic for the following reasons -- they are a pure protein. they have no carbohydrate and are high in fat but it's the right fat that people need. so it could replace, like, cheeseburger farming, hence no greenhouse gases would be produced to actually feed most of the people in the world some great protein. i feel it's going to happen. tavis: so the moral of the story is, repentance, forgiveness and eat more macadamia nuts. >> yeah, the nuts are high on the list. yeah. tavis: there you have it, ladies and gentlem. the new book, "roseannearchy, dispatches from the nut farm" by "new york times" best-selling author and all-around good person. roseanne barr. >> thanks.

sex symbol, as well. tavis: that's our show for tonight. thanks for tuning in. until next time. keep the faith. captioned by the national captioning institute ---www.ncicap.org--- >> for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley at pbs.org. >> join me next time with graham nash and four-time emmy nominee, david duchovny. >> all i know is his name is james and he needs extra help with his reading. i'm james. >> yes. >> to everyone making a difference. >> thank you. >> you help us all live better. >> nationwide insurance supports tavis smiley. with every question and every

answer, nationwide insurance is proud to join tavis in working to improve financial literacy and remove obstacles to economic empowerment one conversation at a time. nationwide is on your side. >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.