Medicine

Conversations host Harry Kreisler interviews medical doctor Larry Brilliant, the executive director of Google.org. Dr. Brilliants reflects on lessons learned in his life's work--a spiritual and humanitarian odyssey to use science and technology to define and address some of humanity's most vexing global problems.

KEYWORDS: Technology, Philanthropy, Public Health, Elberg Lecturers.

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, M.D., for a discussion of the development of a cure for Hodgkin's lymphatic cancer. Tracing her decision to become a medical oncologist, Dr. Jacobs characterizes the challenges of being both an oncologist and biographer. She then traces the history of Hodgkin's disease including the contributions of scientists who identified the cancer, its distinctive pattern of moving through the lymph system, and other clues that led to a cure. Focusing on the career of Stanford's Dr. Henry Kaplan, she describes the qualities...

In his 500th interview, Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Stanford Professor Alain Enthoven for a discussion of public service and policy analysis. Recalling his tenure in the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara during the Kennedy administration, Enthoven describes the efforts to control military expenditures by using systems analysis to consider together weapons acquisition, budgeting, strategy, and national interest. He describes the resistance within the military and Congress, and he reflects on the lessons he learned from this experience.After recalling the...