A very personal mission
Facing incurable cancer, this doctor saw opportunity

Bryant Lin is not a religious man. He is, however, the type of pragmatic human who, long before a terminal cancer diagnosis in May, had learned the art of letting go — how to focus on the important stuff and simply take life as it comes.
“I’m a big believer in being open to what life brings your way,” said Lin, 50, who has been a Stanford Medicine primary care physician, educator and researcher for two decades. “I’m a big believer in serendipity.”
Those beliefs have served him well over the past eight months as life delivered Lin at once his most serendipitous opportunity and his most humbling reality. The diagnosis of late-stage adenocarcinoma, a type of non-small cell lung cancer that afflicts nonsmokers, was equal parts ironic and shocking.
Much of Lin’s work the past six years has been dedicated to raising awareness and supporting research for conditions that disproportionately affect people of Asian descent — so-called never-smoker lung cancer among the most prominent.
“There was a moment of, ‘Wait a second, this can’t really be happening to me, right?’” said Lin, MD, who has recently also focused on melding medicine and the humanities — making sure stories like the one he is now living get told. “When I realized that this really is happening to me,” he added, “I figured, ‘Maybe if I talk about it, I can at least help others.’”
His gift to the world
The thought of leaving behind a wife and two sons far earlier than expected is a gut punch. But Lin’s willingness to accept his fate with grace has enabled him to leverage the moment.
He didn’t ask to be the poster child for never-smoker lung cancer — a highly fatal disease that tends to target a young population — but it is empowering Lin to bring attention to it in ways he never could’ve imagined, even as the co-founder of one of its leading antagonists, the Stanford Center for Asian Research and Education.
CARE’s research presents a stark picture: While overall lung cancer rates fall in concert with declining smoking rates, rates of this particular form of the disease remain persistently higher, with few clear scientific explanations.

It’s why Lin is using his precious time since diagnosis — even when the effects of chemotherapy leave him weak — to tell his story far and wide in hopes that it will spur research and raise awareness about the need for more early screening.
He helped create a documentary illuminating his deep love of life centered on family, he hatched and taught a one-of-a-kind medical school course focused on every aspect of the cancer patient journey, and he helped put on a cancer storytelling event designed to make the dreaded “C” word a harbinger of connection rather than isolation.
“It’s the gift he’s giving the world,” said his oncologist/colleague, Heather Wakelee, MD, who is tasked with helping Lin stay healthy enough to do all the important work left to be done.
“We’re put here to serve a purpose, and this is his. It’s a very personal mission for him.”
Lin’s wife, Christine Chan
Lin has accepted every speaking request that has flooded in; he’s done interviews for news sites, TV, radio and podcasts. A book idea is percolating in his head. Lin has plenty to say before this life of his is over — however long that may be — and he isn’t one to sit around feeling sorry for himself.
He never has been, said his wife, Christine Chan, who met the happy-go-lucky man of her dreams at a group dinner back in college. So why would an incurable cancer diagnosis stand a chance against Lin’s steel fortress of positivity and pragmatism now?
“Bryant isn’t slowing down and that’s fine — he’s someone who makes lemonade out of lemons,” Chan said. “We’re put here to serve a purpose, and this is his. It’s a very personal mission for him.”
The people connection
Lin gravitated toward math at a young age, but he also had passion for language, art and music. After picking up electrical engineering and computer science degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and spending a year in the business consulting world, the picture felt incomplete. It convinced Lin, who had many physician role models in his family, to attend medical school.
For the past 20 years, he has been part of the clinical faculty at Stanford Medicine and has specialized in evaluating patients with medical mysteries. He’s also used his business savvy to help launch successful companies, mainly to create medical devices. Lin said the human-to-human contact and the stories of the people behind the science — whether patients, research fellows, students or business collaborators — have enriched his professional life in ways he could’ve only imagined.
They helped him find his way into the Medical Humanities and the Arts Program, which he has led for three years while also teaching an eclectic range of courses: Storytelling in Medicine, Tackling Asian-American Health Challenges, Generative AI and Medicine, The Digital Future of Health Care, Science and History of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Lasting Letters and the Art of Deep Listening.

Many at Stanford Medicine know Lin best for his idea of pulling the community together during the COVID-19 pandemic by launching the virtual Stuck@Home concert series.
It seemed to him a good way to let people know they weren’t alone; that there were still safe ways to connect with each other. The 15 shows held during shelter-in-place orders drew thousands of grateful viewers. Its popularity — and the in-house talent it revealed — led to the creation of a Stanford Medicine orchestra.
“Bryant is always looking for ways that art can facilitate pathways toward healing,” said his humanities collaborator Lauren Toomer, a lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History. “I meet a lot of amazing people here, but he’s one of the most human people I’ve ever met.”
Talk to his colleagues about Lin and the superlatives flow about a “beautiful person” who is “one of a kind.” Latha Palaniappan, MD, who co-founded the Asian research and education center with Lin, has a more physiological explanation: “Bryant is incredibly well-balanced on both sides of his brain.”
“Bryant just has this excitement about so many things — and the humility, kindness and generosity of spirit to go with it.”
Baldeep Singh, Lin’s supervisor in the Department of
Medicine’s division of primary care and population health
Palaniappan and Baldeep Singh, MD, Lin’s supervisor in the Department of Medicine’s division of primary care and population health, point to his rare acumen in all three arenas of medicine: achievement in the patient room, laboratory and classroom.
“He’s the rare triple threat,” Singh said. “Bryant just has this excitement about so many things — and the humility, kindness and generosity of spirit to go with it.”
Palaniappan hopes Lin’s “profoundly tragic and deeply ironic” predicament will boost awareness for the need of blood- and imaging-based cancer screening, something they have advocated to detect never-smoker lung cancer early. Even if it’s too late to help him and so many others — 42% of lung cancer cases are diagnosed in stage IV, where it’s deemed incurable — Lin is making an impression.
CARE has established a fund in Lin’s honor. The goal: raise $50 million for a lung cancer moonshot to advance research.
“Bryant’s ability to turn adversity into opportunity is making a remarkable impact on the world,” Palaniappan said. “That’s the essence of who he is.”
‘The crap was everywhere’
Before his cancer was diagnosed, Lin’s deep, hacking cough had troubled him for weeks unabated, day and night. Interrupted sleep was becoming the norm.
Still, generally healthy 49-year-olds who have never smoked aren’t conditioned to panic. And being a doctor — “who are notoriously bad patients,” Lin admitted — didn’t have him particularly attuned to his own health. Eventually, a consultation with his primary doctor ruled out the typical culprits: allergies, bronchitis, pneumonia.
It was time for an X-ray. That piece of film revealed a cloudy opaqueness on Lin’s left lung, which led to the CT scan that showed inflammation in the lymph nodes and fluid in left lung. Next came a bronchoscopy; it confirmed there was indeed cancer present in the lungs and lymph nodes.
“The crap was everywhere. There were 50 areas of cancer in my brain — five zero. I’ve seen many patients with metastases, but 50 is a lot.”
Bryant Lin
It would take an MRI of the brain and PET scan of the body to bring Lin’s cancer diagnosis into full technicolor reality. The tumors weren’t just in his lungs and lymph nodes. The cancer had spread to his liver, bones, brain and even parts of his skin.
“The crap was everywhere. There were 50 areas of cancer in my brain — five zero,” Lin said. “I’ve seen many patients with metastases, but 50 is a lot.”
It was a devastatingly sober awakening for Lin. As Wakelee, the Winston Chen and Phyllis Huang Professor, put it: “His cancer was far more advanced at diagnosis than in most people we see. It was everywhere.”
When lung cancer is caught in its first three stages, cures are often possible. Once it has reached stage IV — where an estimated 60% of never-smoker cases are caught because of its wickedly silent onset — it is considered incurable.
As bad as it sounds, Lin was among the relatively lucky nonsmokers who receive this somber news. He was young on the lung cancer age spectrum, which meant there was a high probability that he carried a disease-causing gene mutation — a mutation in the gene for the epidermal growth factor receptor, or EGFR, that is more prevalent in people of Asian heritage.

In the past two decades, Stanford Medicine researchers, including Wakelee, have been among the world leaders in developing drugs that effectively target cancer cells with the mutation. Lin tested positive for the gene mutation, making him eligible for these targeting drugs that, when taken in conjunction with chemotherapy, provide optimum cancer-killing potential.
Again, Lin was fortunate: He is among people for whom the drugs effectively knocked out the cancer cells. After starting treatment, he quickly saw a shrinkage of his tumors everywhere — even in his precious nerve center. “The brain lesions went from 50 down to zero,” Lin said on the first day of class in September 2024. “I’ve been feeling pretty much back to normal.”
“Bryant’s ability to turn adversity into opportunity is making a remarkable impact on the world. That’s the essence of who he is.”
Latha Palaniappan, who co-founded the Stanford
Center for Asian Research and Education with Lin
Of course, this improvement comes with a sobering caveat. The therapies tend to remain effective only temporarily because when the cancer cells grow wise to what’s going on and figure out another pathway toward drug resistance the cancer can return anywhere in the body.
“The challenge is the cancer cells that remain continue to evolve,” Wakelee said, meaning those cells can divide, mutate and create a completely new equation for researchers to target with the existing stable of drugs.
“The EGFR mutation is so common that it’s where a lot of work is being done in cancer research — but it’s also challenging,” Wakelee said. “There’s a lot more we need to be doing.”
‘I want to be here with you’
Filming began on the documentary about Lin, called Be Here with You, almost immediately after his diagnosis. Recognizing the opportunity and having the good fortune of knowing lauded filmmaker Wayne Wong, who directed The Joy Luck Club, the documentary fell into place serendipitously and quickly.
In it, viewers get a glimpse of a weakened Lin, hardly able to take a deep breath or speak without a horrible cough, experiencing his first medical interventions and first moments as a very sick patient.
Then, a few months later, with Lin responding to treatment and feeling much better, we see him at home, composing a letter to his two sons, trying to convey the big ideas of life — such as gratitude — that can be hard to express as a father.
“Mommy and I are happy for the opportunities you have had, and that you have before you. … There are things we can’t control, like health. Gratitude can provide an overarching goodness as you build your lives.”
Lin worked with volunteer letter-writing guide and advocate Frish Brandt to craft the message to Dominic, 17, and Atticus, 13. The themes of gratitude, giving back, being open to the world and finding true happiness shine through the letter and the family interactions.
“… I want to be here with you, to guide and experience your lives. Whether I’m here or not, what I want you to know is that I love you. Of the many things that have given my life meaning, being your daddy is the greatest of all.”
Bryant Lin in a letter to his children
The majority of the 30-minute documentary, filmed mostly in the family home, captures the normal rhythms of the day. Lin holding telehealth appointments with patients from the tiny office he has created in the master bedroom closet or shuttling kids off to activities.
Lin playfully teasing Atticus as they go head to head in chess and table tennis; smiling brightly at the sound of Dominic’s beautiful piano work, in accompaniment with a friend’s cello, playing one of Lin’s favorite orchestral compositions, Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Le cygne” or “The swan.”
“I took a walk and was feeling kind of sorry for myself,” Lin says in that moment. “And then I walk into the house and hear this.”
More than anything, the documentary is a love letter Lin pens to gratitude, togetherness and family — the family he knows he will not be around to enjoy and cherish for nearly long enough. Lin grapples with that reality in his letter, leaving love to serve as the overarching goodness.
“The truth is that, more than anything, I want to be here with you, to guide and experience your lives. Whether I’m here or not, what I want you to know is that I love you. Of the many things that have given my life meaning, being your daddy is the greatest of all.”
Leaving a legacy
The tone in room 308 of the Li Ka Shing Center during MED 275’s first session, in fall 2024, was a bit more clinical — though the curriculum left room for spontaneous emoting. The 10-week course, which Lin aptly named From Diagnosis to Dialogue: A Doctor’s Real-Time Battle with Cancer, was open to both medical and university students. And classes were jam-packed, wall-to-wall from the beginning.
The syllabus covered the full oncological gamut: the mental health impact of cancer; the role of caregivers; how spirituality, ethics, nutrition and diet factor in; the availability and accessibility of treatment; what your ethnicity says about your genetic predisposition. Guest speakers included Chan and all of Lin’s doctors.
Everyone who knows Lin, and even people who don’t, are moved by the simple fact that a person in his position would use his limited time in such a fashion. It’s why even students with no medical school intentions signed up, attended every class and lined up after class to throw extra questions at him — the kind that aren’t often asked because of social norms and self-imposed barriers. What do you tell your kids? How are you processing this yourself? Are you scared?
It became a once-in-a-lifetime, real-time learning lab that was treated specially because everyone involved realized how special it was. On the final day of class, orchestra members — most of whom had played during the social-distancing days of Stuck@Home — came with their various instruments and gave Lin a fitting serenade.
Lin is calm and stoic by nature, but even he found himself overwhelmed by some of the moments unspooling before his eyes in this class of his creation. The most memorable might have been during the very first class while Lin recalled how a letter from a dear elderly patient who was near death had fortified his decision to become a physician.
“You treated me as you would treat your own father,” the man had written to Lin during his final hours of life. Lin reached for the nearby tissue box as he read those words, wondering aloud about the remainder of his own life: “One year? Two years? Five Years?”
Then he distilled the purpose of MED 275, and everything he will keep on doing until he no longer can, into its purest essence. Lin, who has yet to miss a day of work since that cancer diagnosis in May, knows serendipity when he sees it.
“This class is part of my letter.”
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