Robert A. Winn, MD

On her first day of medical school at the University of Virginia in 1963, Vivian Pinn waited for the other students who looked like her to show up. 

As a student at MIT in the 1970s, Roderic Pettigrew was writing his PhD thesis on how a controlled nuclear reaction in the brain, boron neutron activation therapy, could be used to treat glioblastoma multiforme.

Those of us interested in the health of Americans of all races write to support the FDA ban on menthol flavoring in tobacco products. Such a ban will potentially prevent thousands of deaths per year from cancer, lung disease, as well as cardiovascular disease.

The events of the past few weeks in Israel and Gaza, with all the tragic loss of life, are paralleled by another war—a war of words in the public arena reflecting political and ideological loyalties of those who are with, and those who are against. 

This week came word of the passing of Franklyn Prendergast, professor emeritus of the Mayo College of Medicine and Science and director emeritus of the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center. 

By Robert A. Winn, MDDirector and Lipman Chair in Oncology, VCU Massey Cancer Center,Senior associate dean for cancer innovation, VCU School of Medicine,Professor, Division of Pulmonary Disease and Critical Care Medicine,Virginia Commonwealth University;Guest editor, The Cancer History ProjectAsk members of the oncology community about the Howard University Cancer Center (HUCC), and more than 70 years later they will more than likely mention the man who laid the foundation for it.

Selwyn M. Vickers wants Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to become better known in Harlem, Coney Island, and other parts of New York City where the elite institution he now leads is not a go-to place. 

Richard Silvera is working to build trust between doctors Bronx communities  that have a heavy burden of anal cancer. 

Richard B. Warnecke, PhD, a longtime member of the University of Illinois Cancer Center and a national leader in cancer control research, died Aug. 19. He was 84.

Before May 14, 2022, if you mentioned Buffalo, NY, my mind would have taken me back to the city I knew in the 1960s. I grew up there. I was a kid from the ‘hood whose grandmother instilled messages about living a life based on grace and humility from day one. I was a Head Start kid surrounded by people who believed in the power of providing possibility. I was a kid from the poor, Black neighborhood that bordered the poorer, Black neighborhood, but I was rich in the experiences that earned me an acceptance letter to the University of Notre Dame where I got the foundation I needed to go to medical school. It is Buffalo, however, where I got the foundation I needed for life.

Edith Mitchell came a long way from growing up on a Tennessee farm, to becoming a brigadier general and serving on the President’s Cancer Panel.

Harold Freeman had big plans after he finished his residency at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 1968. He planned to cut cancer out of Harlem.

The Cancer History Project Guest Editor Robert Winn focused on the legacy of LaSalle Leffall, a Howard University surgical oncologist. He and John H. Stewart, director of Louisiana State University-Louisiana Children’s Medical Center Health Cancer Center spoke with Wayne A.I. Frederick, president of Howard University.

Racial and ethnic inequities are pervasive in clinical research—from the systemic factors that deter underrepresented populations from pursuing careers in science and medicine, to the discrimination, lack of support, and other hardships faced by those who do enter the biomedical profession.

Few people can say they have contributed more to our field than Dr. Walter Lawrence, Jr., and we are so deeply saddened by his passing Nov. 9 at age 96.

Mainstream tobacco control advocates are celebrating the recent announcement that the Food and Drug Administration is poised to restrict the manufacture and sale of mentholated cigarettes and cigars.

On Monday, March 1, Adekunle “Kunle” Odunsi will become the director of the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center—and the second Black director of an NCI-designated cancer center.

As she became president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, Lori J. Pierce decided to focus on equity in cancer care as her year-long presidential theme.

Like a laser, COVID-19 traced the shocking contours of inequality in America's health system—demonstrating that science and health equity have always been inseparable.

I am almost certain that no other director of an NCI-designated cancer center can claim the distinction of having had a gun pulled on them by police.

On a chaotic COVID weekend two months ago, a friend’s child (a young, talented black and Latino student athlete) came home from college not feeling well. The young man’s mother, an executive administrative assistant, called off work to stay home with him because of his, as she described, “full-blown flu-like symptoms.”

As the crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic deepens, the two separate, unequal societies that make up the United States of America are equally frightened, bewildered, and unsure of what comes next.

Advances in the field of tumor immunotherapy have given great hope for those treating cancer. We are in an era of unprecedented achievements, as evidenced by impressive clinical responses in patients treated with adoptive cell therapy and immune checkpoint inhibitors.

Heinz Von Foerster, the renowned Austrian-American physicist and cybernetics scholar, declared that “information can be considered as order wrenched from disorder.1” Ever-increasing amounts of digital data and new computational tools promise that technological developments such as artificial intelligence (AI) will bring order, clarity, and new solutions in multiple areas—from transportation to criminal justice.