Over the last 15 years, Stanford Biodesign – now called the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign - has trained more than 1,000 graduate students and nearly 200 fellows. In a new 1:2:1 podcast, Paul Yock, the Martha Meier Weiland Professor of Medicine, founding co-chair of Stanford’s Department of Bioengineering, and Biodesign’s director, discusses the program's success.

Veteran NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw takes life at a much different pace than during his swashbuckling days as a mega broadcaster. In 2013, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma at age 73. He chronicled his battle with cancer in the recent memoir, A Lucky Life Interrupted.

Crystal Mackall, MD, will lead a cancer immunotherapy center at Stanford that is being launched with an initial $10 million grant from the Parker Foundation.

Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD, calls the human brain “the most complicated object in the universe.” The Stanford psychiatrist and bioengineer is well-known for developing two game-changing techniques — optogenetics and CLARITY.

In this podcast, former President Jimmy Carter talks about the plight of women and girls around the globe.

Thought leaders from several disciplines recently gathered at the Stanford campus for the inaugural ChildX conference to discuss how to solve health problems in pregnancy, infancy and childhood. One session focused on the future of child health in an aging America and featured Stanford health policy expert Paul Wise, MD, MPH, where he discussed the evaporation of child health policy in the U.S. In this podcast he talks about hows health policy has turned into cost-containment policy, spelling...

New attention is being paid to a growing nationwide public health crisis - an epidemic of heroin use. In the last 13 years, there has been a fourfold increase in heroin overdoses in the United States. So what’s fueling the explosion of heroin use? Stanford addiction expert Keith Humphreys, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, says that it’s largely propelled by the huge number of prescriptions for opioid painkillers. In this podcast, he discusses the nationwide epidemic and...

Jonas Salk: A Life tells the story of the brilliant and complicated physician who discovered and developed the first vaccine for polio. Physician-author Charlotte Jacobs, MD, professor emerita of medicine at Stanford, spent the past decade digging through archives, conducting over a hundred interviews and reading countless first-hand accounts and period news to write her latest biography.

Molecular biologist-turned Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, PhD, shares his thoughts on the meaning of happiness, the power of mediation and why the world needs altruism more than ever.

In this 1:2:1 podcast, bestselling author and physician Abraham Verghese, MD, discusses the timeless rituals of medicine. http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2015spring/time-lines.html

In this 1:2:1 podcast, Stanford neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi opens up about his battle with terminal lung cancer and how he is facing his own mortality.

Stanford pain psychologist Beth Darnall, PhD, discusses her new book, “Less Pain, Fewer Pills,” which is aimed at helping the millions of sufferers regain control over their chronic pain without the use of opioids.

The post of U.S. surgeon general has remained vacant for nearly a year. An appointment by President Obama is mired in Washington politics. So it raises the question: Can we do without a surgeon general? And, does the role of the nation’s top doctor still matter? Associated Press medical reporter Mike Stobbe’s new book, Surgeon General’s Warning, argues that it does. In this podcast, he discusses the book and the decline of the surgeon general’s office.

Two years ago, Stanford surgeon Sherry Wren, MD, had excruciating pain in her neck. The cause was never really pinpointed. Was it a result of a harrowing escape from a sinking yacht in Malaysia, or just years of wear and tear from leaning over in the OR? The surgery to remove a ruptured disc resulted in a partial paralysis that temporarily derailed her career. In this podcast, she shares her pain — both physical and mental — and how the journey to return to surgery made her both a better...

He’s CNN’s chief medical correspondent, and a neurosurgeon too. And now Sanjay Gupta is using his very public platform to talk about the benefits of medical marijuana, and the need to combat loneliness. In this podcast, Gupta discusses why he decided not to become the surgeon general in the Obama administration, what it’s like to report on health crises around the globe and his new campaign to "Just Say Hello."

He apprenticed with the famed photographer Annie Liebovitz at Rolling Stone magazine when he was 18 years old. And over the years photographer Max Aguilera-Hellweg has shot photos for a multitude of international publications including Stern, Rolling Stone, the New Yorker, Esquire, the New York Times, Washington Post, and National Geographic. He has one more credit to his portfolio which is most unusual - he’s a physician. At 43 years old, he received his medical degree from Tulane...

Stanford neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD, has found that infusions of blood plasma from young mice improves memory and learning in old mice. In this podcast, Wyss-Coray, who is also a senior research career scientist at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, discusses the new study along with his plans to explore whether the findings could lead to treatments for brain diseases like Alzheimer's.

Should physicians weigh the costs of treatments when making decisions about clinical care? Organizations like the American College of Cardiology recently have issued guidelines that allow docs to use cost data to rate the value of medical decisions. Paul Heidenreich, MD, professor of cardiovascular medicine at Stanford and co-chair of the committee that wrote the new policy for the ACC, discusses the issue in this podcast.

A few years ago, Stanford cardiologist Euan Ashley, MD, described the promise of genomics for diagnosing and treating diseases as the "wild west" - a lot of researchers examining ways of using the technique, but too early to have meaningful results in the clinic. Since then, much has changed in the field.

METRICS is a new center at Stanford University that aims to transform research practices to improve the reproducibility, efficiency and quality of scientific investigations.

Many argue that international health aid is wasted and doesn't reach the people who really need it. But a new Stanford analysis of both government and private aid programs shows that the funding leads to significant improvements, especially in life expectancy and child mortality rates. In this podcast, health-policy expert Eran Bendavid, MD, discusses the new study.

Electronic-cigarette use has grown rapidly across the United States, prompting questions about the devices’ safety and whether they serve as a gateway to conventional cigarettes or a means of kicking the habit without inhaling the carcinogens in smoke.

A gene variant know as ApoE4 is the strongest known single genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s, a neurological syndrome that affects about 30 million people worldwide. But a new study led by Stanford neurologist Michael Greicius, MD, shows that women who carry a copy of the variant have a substantially greater risk for the disease than do men.

In his best-selling book, My Age of Anxiety, Scott Stossel describes his long-standing struggle with anxiety, and examines the efforts to understand what is now considered the most common form of mental illness in the United States.

Dick Cheney has lived with chronic heart disease for virtually all of his adult life. At 37, as a young man running for the U.S. Congress in Wyoming, he had his first heart attack. His last – a fifth – occurred in 2010.