Ever since I was 13-years old I wanted to cancer research. From that point on everything I did was pointed in that direction. I have two admirable traits. The first is that I am a very determined person and the second one is that I’m very patient. Those two things kept me focused on what I had to do to get where I wanted to go. That place was in the lab doing cancer research. After graduating from high school as a Pre-Med student, I went to Villanova University and became a Science Major. I did this because I didn’t want to be a physician, so skipped over the Biology Major thing to the utter amazement of my friends. The reason for this was that was the fact that the Science Major curriculum was second in difficulty right behind Chemical Engineering. Even though it didn’t matter to me, but my classmates couldn’t understand how I could party with them and still take differential equations and physical chemistry. Frankly, I couldn’t understand it either, but it was fun. Anyway, I survived Villanova and got my first cancer research position at the Wistar Institute on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus. It was a mouse cellular immunology lab, where I learned what became my research “bread and butter” so to speak. That was setting up models of the immune response to cancer outside of the body. This made it much easier to study the role of different immune cells and proteins involved with the response without the interference caused by the rest of the body’s cells. A couple of years later I met this incredible cancer doctor (oncologist) at Penn’s hospital and he saw patients that had melanoma. This was so cool because after he hired as his Research Associate he said, “Here’s the lab, I have a lot of patients to see, and I’ll talk to you later.” It was great because I had complete autonomy over the lab and the research.
Needless to say, aside from the four years I spent at Villanova, the next fifteen years were some of the best years of my life. During that time our lab was the first lab in this country to not only accurately describe the immune response to melanoma, but also determine what proteins on the surface of the cancer cells were used by the immune system to attack them. We were completely funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) the whole time. It’s really hard to explain what that period of my life was like, but both my professional and personal life was very exciting. Then I decided to stay at Penn and get my PhD in Immunology. I was a full-time student and a full-time employee at the same time. I was only one of two people who were ever able to do that in the history of our graduate department. As a matter of fact the other person who did that was my co-worker Jeannette. After graduation I said my provisional farewells. They were provisional because I ended up coming back to Penn twice for two separate positions for an additional 5 years. I continued to do cancer and some AIDs research for another ten years or so until the Iraq war started and funding from the NIH got sparse. The one thing about those thirty years was that I met and got to know over 300 cancer patients. Most of them I met while they were being treated in the 3 hospitals I did research at, but many of them were from my family and the families of friends. The people who knew me also knew that I did cancer research and would ask me to go and see their loved one and/or their doctor. I did this hundreds of times and I’m still doing it now. What I’d do is go back to the patient or family and try to translate some of the technical medical terms onto a language that they could understand. You’d be surprised how difficult it is to understand, especially if you’re under stress.
Back then I was faced with a major decision about my life. Since I could no longer get my own grants I’d have to work for someone else, which I was and still unwilling to do. Even though most of the cancer patients I mentioned are not here today, I just couldn’t walk away. The reason why is because many of them gave me the strength to become what I am today. They were very encouraging to me at times when I needed encouragement like when I was in grad school. They would encourage me to keep working and do a good job. This request wasn’t for them I think, but for the thousands after them that would be diagnosed with cancer. Therefore I decided to become and author of books about cancer, but it came with a price. I had to give-up everything and I mean everything. The place I lived, my car, my possessions, and even my cats. I became homeless for a time, but I started to write and decided to get a masters degree in Liberal Arts at Widener University. I just published (“Immune-based Cancer Treatment: The T lymphocyte Response”/Amazon.com) the first of three books in February and it’s about the cellular immune response to various types of cancer. The first half of the book is written simply, but it gets progressively more complex as you go further. I wrote the book for immunology students in college, grad school, or med school who might be interested in cancer immunology as a career. Since reasonably educated people can read it, I also intended it to be read by cancer patients because it discusses a new type of cancer therapy called “Immunotherapy”. I think it’s the future of cancer treatment and I want patients to be able to understand how it works and if it’s appropriate for them. I have two more completed books. One is an autobiography that has amalgamated cancer patient short stories within each chapter. The other is a fiction book that’s set in the future. It’s about a brilliant young man and his sister (Alan and Maggie). Both of them are mentally gifted and Alan, now a young (17 year-old) Harvard grad discovers, during his first year in grad school at Penn, the ultimate cure for cancer. He’s quite anti-establishment and decides not to turn it over to Penn, where it would be regulated by the government and sold by a pharmaceutical company. Instead he decides to give it away for free. He takes off in his flying car and with the help of this friends (which includes an artificially intelligent computer named Albert) and sister Maggie cure hundreds of people with terminal cancer all over the country. Eventually, after a cross-country chase by the government and the Pharmaceutical companies, he gives up. He becomes and American hero after he’s pardoned by the President.
This was the most fun I ever had writing anything. It just came out. I put my hands on the keyboard and typed. I’d go back to edit it and couldn’t believe I wrote it. Sometimes, I wouldn’t even remember writing some of those pages. It was just amazing and the most fun I’ve had since I stopped doing experiments. Anyway, I’ll be done with this Masters program at the end of this year (2011). I think the next thing for me to continue to try and help cancer patients. My next move will be to get another PhD, but this time in Clinical Psychology. Obviously, I’d want to major in oncology. So in four years, I’ll be able to counsel patients and their families about just how to understand and deal with this disease we call cancer. Now the final thing you might be asking yourself is: why did I write all of this? That’s a good question and the answer is that I just wanted to let people know that it’s all right to change careers. Yes it is scary, but as long as you know where your going and where you came from it will be just fine. And besides it’s exciting.
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