Ground Truths

The tumor microenvironment (TME) , composed of immune cells, fibroblasts, and endothelial cells, has emerged as critical to pathogenesis, prognosis and treatment for cancer (schematic Figure below). There’s no such thing as TMI (too much information) for TME! Yet there’s still no way of assessing it in the clinic by a blood test, and even by invasive biopsy the sampling bias for TME without broade...

“I may be the expert in cancer, but you are the expert in you.”—Elisa Port, MD Ground Truths is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Dr. Elisa Port is Professor of Surgery, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Chief of Breast Surgery for the Mount Sinai Health System; Director of the Dubin Breast Center; and Dire...

Helen Pearson, PhD, is an award-winning biomedical journalist at Nature, named European Science Journalist of the Year in 2025. She teaches science writing at University College London. BEYOND BELIEF is her second, just published book. THE LIFE PROJECT was her first. The points we covered include: —The evolution of evidence over 8 decades, moving from rationalism, expert opinion, hunches (eminence...

Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

Joanna Stern was the Wall Street Journal technology journalist for 12 years. She’s an Emmy award winner for her documentary E-Ternal , and recently started her own company New Things , with added advice from ChatGPT! Over the years at WSJ, I relied on Joanna’s reviews of technology for many purchases (and things I avoided) reflecting her keen and brutal assessments. I also had fun working with her...

“You are a slightly different genetic version of yourself today from yesterday, and will be different yet again tomorrow.”—Roxanne Khamsi “Each neuron really is a beautiful and unique snowflake”—Ed Yong Roxanne Khamsi is one of the leading life science journalists, a contributing writer at The Atlantic , recognized with multiple awards for notable publications. Her new book is entitled BEYOND INHE...

This is one of my favorite books over recent years. Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Cocker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council of Foreign Relations and author of 6 bestselling books. THE INFINITY MACHINE tells the story of AI’s progress over the past 15 years largely, but not exclusively, from Demis Hassabis as the protagonist and leader of DeepMind’, with its 2010 mission st...

Dr. Trisha Pasricha is a gastroenterologist, Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, and the Ask a Doctor columnist for The Washington Post. Her new book gets deep into the stigmatized, taboo, rarely discussed topics of our bowel movements and farts, no less the science that backs that up, with lucid explainers for the mechanisms (such as the gut-brain axis). Her research is on the gut orig...

Adrian is a molecular biologist and co-founder and CEO of Genyro, a synthetic biology company. He has published 2 previous books on life science (Life Without Genes and An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Genetics). In this conversation we discussed his new book, cover below and the title of this post. ABI. As Adrian puts it, a monumental shift, a second genesis, the “artivolution,” ability to use a...

Yo-El Ju is the Barbara Burton and Reuben Morris Professor of Neurology at Washington University, St. Louis. She got her AB from Harvard and MD from Columbia and actively practices sleep medicine and is a prolific researcher, one of the top sleep scientists in the country. Here are some of the topics we discussed and a few related hyperlinked citations: —Importance of Deep Sleep (and her paper on...

Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

The vagus nerve, also known as the Great Nerve, connects the brain to all parts of the body, like an internet (Figure below). Every week we’re learning more about its importance for health and disease. Until recent years the brain and immune system were thought to be in separate “firewalled” compartments. But that turned out to be far from the truth. Dr. Kevin Tracey, who directs the Feinstein Ins...

Back in 2005 Dan Buettner patented Blue Zones. He’s written 9 books, of which 5 were NY Times bestsellers, and has another one in the works. His 2023 Netflix documentary series “Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones” won Emmy awards and was widely viewed. Many of the main points that Dan has emphasized over the years—healthy diet (he highlighted whole grains, beans, nuts, greens, and “peasant foo...

Jonathan Kipnis is a neuroscientist, the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Distinguished Professor of Pathology and Immunology at Washington University, St. Louis, who discovered meningeal lymphatics and has been a prolific researcher in brain drainage and the continuous immune system surveillance of the brain. I made this infographic with the help of Notebook LM to summarize many of the concepts we disc...

A recording from my enthralling conversation with Prof Matthew Cobb about the life and science contributions of Francis Crick, regarded as one of the most influential biologists of all times, along with Darwin and Mendel. As you’ll see, there’s so much more to Crick’s story than cracking DNA’s double helix structure in a matter of weeks with James Watson. Matthew Cobb, Emeritus Professor of the Un...

A couple of weeks ago, the FDA Commissioner published a WSJ oped “ The FDA Liberates Women’s Hormone Replacement Therapy” (←gift link) and, with other FDA colleagues, a JAMA essay entitled “Updated Labeling for Menopausal Hormone Therapy” (open-access). That change, and the data cited, led to a series of articles in the days that followed, such as at STAT News “FDA reverses decades-old warning on...

Dr. Susan Monarez was the first CDC Director to be confirmed by the Senate and served from July 31, 2025 – August 27, 2025. Because she refused to give approval to new vaccine recommendations without ever seeing them or their evidence and firing scientists without cause, she was fired. In my view, she’s a hero for standing up for science and speaking truth to power. In her first live interview sin...

Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

Prof Shana Kelley is the Neena Schwartz Professor of Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University and President of the CZI Chicago Biohub, which brings together life scientists at Northwestern, University of Chicago, and U. Illinois Urbana Champaign. Her lab’s website provides recent publications in the 3 major areas of biomolecular sensors, rare and single cell analysis, and in...

Thank you Bruce Lanphear , Clyde Wilson , Tracy Dennis-Tiwary , Diego Pereyra , Dr Mike Hunter , and many others for tuning into my live video with Charlotte Blease ! Join me for my next live video in the app. Whether A.I. will transform the practice of medicine in a positive way remains controversial. Health researcher Prof Charlotte Blease, on faculty at Uppsala University in Sweden and research...

Thank you Sara Garcia , Andrew O'Malley BSc PhD , Sam Hester , Julie , Stephen B. Thomas, PhD , and so many others for tuning into my live video with Peter Hotez ! Join me for my next live video in the app. Peter Hotez and I discuss his new book, co-authored with Michael Mann, SCIENCE UNDER SEIGE, on the anti-science superstorm culminating from the climate crisis, the Covid pandemic, and a vast in...

Thank you Jose Bolanos MD , Dr. Zeest Khan , Lawrence Toole , Julie , Stephen B. Thomas, PhD , and many others for tuning into my live video with Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Join me for my next live video in the app. A Brief Summary of Our Conservation We discussed the new understanding and approach to chronic pain, which affects nearly 1 in 4 adults. Dr. Gupta gets personal telling the story of his wife, R...

Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

This is a hybrid heart disease risk factor post of a podcast with Prof Bruce Lanphear on lead and a piece I was asked to write for the Washington Post on risk factors for heart disease. First, the podcast. You may have thought the problem with lead exposure was circumscribed to children, but it’s a much bigger issue than that. I’ll concentrate on the exposure risk to adults in this interview, incl...