Quick, what color is menthol? No, it’s not green. That’s the color of the KOOL, Newport, or Salem cigarette pack. Get it? Green is cool. Red is hot.
In the early morning of April 30, 35 years ago, I was awakened by a call from Anatoly Dobrynin, a long-time Soviet Ambassador to the United States. He said General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev wanted me to come to the Soviet Union to help treat victims of the Chernobyl nuclear power facility accident. I had cabled Gorbachev a few days earlier, offering my assistance.
As the world faced the threat of a novel respiratory pathogen, SARS-CoV-2, in the first months of 2020, there was a great deal of uncertainty about its effect on people, especially those living with a diagnosis of cancer.
Can one be too smart? In some disciplines such as physics and mathematics the answer is clearly no. In medicine, the answer is not so clear.
Sometime in 1995, Edith Mitchell, a U.S. Air Force oncologist who at the time served as commander of the 131st Medical Squadron at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, first heard the name Jane Cooke Wright.
Imagine a future where cancer patients are able to receive the treatment they precisely need and not the treatment that is prescribed to all.
In January, after tumultuous weeks filled with unprecedented political tension and rising COVID-19 infections across the nation, thrilling news arrived quietly in my email inbox: official notice of the Abramson Cancer Center's five-year, $45 million Cancer Center Support Grant award from the National Cancer Institute, which had bestowed us with a merit rating of “Exceptional” Comprehensive Cancer Center last year.
Cancer patients and survivors should not get COVID-19. A three-time cancer survivor should definitely not get COVID. But I did. And it was not good. Here is my story and the lessons I learned that might be of value to others.
President Donald Trump is hardly the first septuagenarian world leader to mistrust doctors and science.
The recent historic election of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris provides an exciting opportunity for the cancer research and medical science communities during the next four years to dramatically improve the health of our nation and the world.
