Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. —Theodore Roosevelt Longevity, in and of itself, is not an accomplishment. Luck and good genes are just human lottery tickets. Most people fortunate enough to live long lives have a productive sweet ...
Robert C. Young, MD, ASCO Past President, longtime leader of Fox Chase Cancer Center, and an internationally recognized expert in lymphoma and ovarian cancer, is a forward-looking doctor who is confident about something not in his future: retirement. “I’ll never quit working; I’m just not wired...
Dear Dr. Wilson: I am writing to express our family’s deepest and heartfelt appreciation for the lifesaving care you and your team provided for our son, Patrick…. I don’t know how widely it is known that you save lives at the National Cancer Institute—offering hope to people like Patrick, who have...
At the end of the day, I’m still a kid from South Philly,” Andrew C. von Eschenbach, MD, former Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), told The ASCO Post. Dr. von Eschenbach is the product of a closely knit yet culturally...
John L. Marshall, MD, a global leader in the research and treatment of gastrointestinal cancers, grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, in a family that put high value on education. As a young boy, science was already on his mind; he enjoyed the explorative nature that chemistry and biology offered....
The Tampa Bay area of Florida is a haven for golfers and fishermen looking to unwind under the warm tropical skies. And the clean highways stretching through the scenic west coast of Florida are also a perfect excuse for weekend motorcycle enthusiasts, such as Alan F. List, MD, the President and...
Due to childhood health issues, Sandra J. Horning, MD, formed an opinion about doctors at a young age: They were good people who helped other people. By her early teens, Dr. Horning began to ponder a career in medicine, which offered the possibility of blending her love of science with a career...
As a young boy growing up in the Bronx, Vincent T. DeVita, Jr, MD, admired the local iceman, a thick-muscled guy known as Nunzi, who used to carry a big block of ice on his shoulder with a set of tongs, and effortlessly slide it into the DeVitas’ icebox. “A friend once asked me what I wanted to be...
At the 2007 ASCO Annual Meeting, Lodovico Balducci, MD, received the inaugural B.J. Kennedy Award and Lecture for Scientific Excellence in Geriatric Oncology. Called the “patriarch of geriatric oncology,” Dr. Balducci is widely known in the oncology community for his warm humor and thick Italian...
Clara D. Bloomfield, MD, FASCO, always sat in the front row at school. She grew up during a rigidly paternalist period in American society, and her early feminist leanings were brushed aside as grade-school adventures. The medical school lecture room of the 1960s was a male-dominated culture, and...
When Emil J Freireich, MD, retires from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center on September 1, he will have spent 50 years at the institution and a total of 60 years in the pursuit of curing childhood leukemia as well as other cancers and in the educational development of young...
Bookmark Title: The Cancer Solution: Taking Charge of Your Life With CancerAuthor: Jack C. Westman, MD, MSPublisher: Archway PublishingPublication date: January 15, 2015Price: $20.00; paperback, 310 pages I was at a meeting in San Francisco in 1978 and received a call from my wife, Nancy:...
Gianni Bonadonna, MD, was considered the “Father of Italian Oncology,” but his scientific contributions to the field and his generous collegial spirit extended far beyond the shores of his native land. Dr. Bonadonna was at the forefront in the battle to convince the surgical establishment that...
BOOKMARK Title: The Conversation: A Revolutionary Plan for End-of-life CareAuthor: Angelo E. Volandes, MDPublisher: BloomsburyPublication date: January 13, 2015Price: $26.00; hardcover, 240 pages A quick Google search on books about end-of-life care will yield pages of hits on the subject. The...
St. Barnabas Hospital is located in the heart of Bronx, New York, and as such, it has a culturally diverse, largely poor, patient population. The backbone of successful palliative care services is the doctor-patient communication bonding process. However, many of the patients with late-stage cancer ...
Cancer prevention is a child-care issue. With many of cancer’s instigators planting their seeds during childhood, we—as a profession and as a nation—must seize this important window of opportunity to protect the health and well-being of future generations. Current estimates suggest that up to...
Oncology nurse practitioner Mary Pazdur, RN, MSN, spent her professional life bettering the clinical care and outcomes of cancer patients, culminating in her career at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), in the Laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Biology, working with patients on cancer vaccine...
BookmarkTitle: Malignant Metaphor: Confronting Cancer MythsAuthor: Alanna MitchellPublisher: ECW PressPublication date: September 15, 2015Price: $24.95; hardcover, 184 pages Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom...
Studies demonstrate that patients with advanced cancer who are not actively engaged in planning their end-of-life care often receive overly aggressive, physically taxing, costly and unnecessary treatment toward life’s end. Recent findings indicate that African Americans appear to be more apt to...
Bookmark Title: Curing Medicare: One Doctor’s View of How Our Health Care System Is Failing the Elderly and How to Fix It Author: Andy Lazris, MD Publisher: CreateSpace Publication date: September 13, 2014 Price: $13.75; paperback, 290 pages Several years ago I decided to write a book about...
Ronald Go, MD, of the Mayo Clinic, discusses a study that used the National Cancer Data Base to determine the extent to which the number of non-Hodgkin lymphoma patients treated annually in a facility affects overall survival (Abstract 266).
Gianni Bonadonna, MD, was considered the “Father of Italian Oncology,” but his scientific contributions to the field and his generous collegial spirit extended far beyond the shores of his native land. Dr. Bonadonna was at the forefront in the battle to convince the surgical...
Noninvasive quantitative computed tomography–based texture analysis can accurately differentiate the presence of a KRAS mutation from pan–wild-type non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), based on the results of a study in PLOS ONE. Weiss et al reported that this tumor heterogeneity...