James Allison interviewed by John Inglis in 2005 [view of both Allison and Inglis] [ends at 31:06]

Preserved in 2020-2022 through a CLIR Recordings at Risk grant. This interview video is available for use under a CC0 1.0 Universal license.

James Allison was born in Alice, Texas in the United States. He studied at the University of Texas in Austin, and he received his PhD there in 1973. He worked at the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla, California; University of Texas System Cancer Center, Smithville, Texas; University of California, Berkeley; Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York; Weill Cornell Medicine, New York; and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Chevy Chase, Maryland. Since 2012 he has been a professor at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Cancer kills millions of people every year and is one of humanity’s greatest health challenges. By stimulating the inherent ability of our immune system to attack tumor cells James Allison and Tasuku Honjo have established an entirely new principle for cancer therapy. In 1994–1995, Allison studied a known protein that functions as a brake on the immune system. He realized the potential of releasing the brake and thereby unleashing our immune cells to attack tumors. He then developed this concept into a new approach for treating patients.