To date, Michael P. Link has the unique honor of being the only pediatric oncologist to have served as president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
Link, who is the Lydia J. Lee Professor in Pediatric Oncology at Stanford University, appeared on the Cancer History Project Podcast in conversation with Paul Goldberg, co-editor of the Cancer History Project and editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter.
In honor of Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, Link revisits what drew him to pediatric oncology, his auspicious mentors, his 2011-2012 ASCO Presidential term—and his concerns about what he’s seeing in oncology today.
Over the course of his career, Link has seen a childhood cancer cure rate increase from a mere 40% to closer to 90%. But he’s concerned about how the field of oncology is being impacted today.
In his 2012 Presidential address, Link said:
“There is another lesson from our children—that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. This is a lesson not just from pediatric oncology, but from pediatrics in general. Prevention strategy through immunization has proven to be one of the greatest triumphs of pediatrics and of modern medicine. Rather than diagnosing and treating diphtheria, widespread immunization simply eliminated it as a health problem in North America. The near eradication of measles, polio, and serious infections from H Influenzae is a similar triumph.”
He expressed shock about how things have changed in 2025.
“I'm a pediatrician, so here I am and they have measles? I mean really, measles in 2025? How is that possible?” Link said. “I never thought I'd be in a position where I have to talk to people about measles and polio and chickenpox as a threat... And measles, it's a matter of how serious your illness is going to be, and if you're immunocompromised it's life threatening.”
Other concerns from his time as ASCO President have reemerged—or never really gone away.
In 2012, Link said, “But all this newfound insight into these diseases and their treatment is only as good as our ability to deliver what we know. The current chemotherapy shortage is emblematic of the precarious nature of the path between the discovery and the delivery of our most exciting new findings.”
Speaking on the podcast, Link called this an issue of “whack-a-mole”—where new drugs go into shortage on a regular basis. “Can you believe that here we are in whatever year it is, 20-whenever the next shortage is going to come and we don't have access to this?”
A transcript of this conversation, along with an archive of related content, is available on the Cancer History Project: https://cancerhistoryproject.com/article/michael-link-podcast/
As an oncology nurse practitioner at NCI’s Clinical Center and wife of FDA’s Richard Pazdur, Mary Pazdur knew cancer drug development inside and out. When she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she and Rick got to know “the other side of the stethoscope.”
In his 25 year career at FDA, Rick has shaped the FDA approach to drug approval, setting forth a set of criteria accepted by drug companies, academics and NCI. And for 16 years, Mary was by his side, with compassion, intuition, and practicality. She was described by one colleague as having a “combination of efficiency and great humanity, [...] compassion and strength.”
This interview with Rick and Mary Pazdur was recorded in 2015, a few months before she died, and was conducted by Ellen Stovall, three-time cancer survivor and pioneering patient advocate, on behalf of the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship. Stovall also died a few months later—in January 2016—from cardiac complications due to her cancer treatments.
This episode is accompanied by a robust archive about Rick and Mary Pazdur, as well as further reading about Ellen Stovall.
Read more at https://cancerhistoryproject.com/article/rick-and-mary-pazdur/
Melvin J. Silverstein, now Medical Director of Hoag Breast Center and the Gross Family Foundation Endowed Chair in Oncoplastic Breast Surgery at USC, sat down with Stacy Wentworth, radiation oncologist and medical historian, to reflect on his career.
Silverstein founded the Van Nuys Breast Center in 1979. As he saw more and more and more patients with what was only recently coming to be known as ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), he wrote the first major textbook on the disease and developed the Van Nuys Classification for Ductal Carcinoma in Situ of the Breast as well as the USC Van Nuys Prognostic Index.
Wentworth asked Silverstein about a time when his science was challenged by the medical establishment.
At the time, most surgeons favored treating DCIS just like aggressive, invasive breast cancers, with mastectomy and radiation.
Silverstein wasn’t so sure about that. He felt that, in some cases, radiation wasn’t necessary.
Silverstein debated against radiation oncologists at conferences for years, and his arguments stirred up visceral responses, he recalls.
“Pro-radiation therapy were all the radiation oncologists from academic centers. That was Jay Harris, who was I guess my arch rival in this. He once, after one of these talks, came up to me, smiled at me and said, ‘You're killing patients.’ Which broke my heart,” Silverstein said. “It was a terrible thing. He said to me after not giving radiation therapy, but it turns out in the long run, everybody's come on board. And clearly now it's 25, 30 years later, some people have finally agreed that they all don't need it.”
Recent trial results have confirmed Silverstein’s analysis that not all patients with DCIS need radiation.
Today, Silverstein runs the USC breast fellowship program, which has an emphasis on oncoplastic surgery—the first of its kind.
Read more at https://cancerhistoryproject.com/article/melvin-silverstein/
This interview with Walter Lawrence Jr. was conducted in 2020, when Lawrence was 95 years old and director emeritus of VCU Massey Cancer Center. Lawrence died one year later, on Nov. 9, 2021.
Lawrence was one of the founders of the field of surgical oncology, setting up the first-ever university-based division of surgical oncology at what later became VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center, in Richmond, Virginia. He served as director of VCU Massey from 1975 to 1988, during which time the cancer center earned NCI designation.
Lawrence spoke with Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter, and Robert Winn, director of VCU.
“The thing that was exciting about the National Cancer Act, which I think was one of the best things President Nixon did, among things that weren’t so good, was that it did bring the federal government into the funding of various kinds of research,” Lawrence said.
Lawrence saw promise in the National Cancer Act, and earning the Cancer Center designation from NCI in 1975 allowed VCU, then called the Medical College of Virginia, to become systematically involved in clinical trials.
“Randomized clinical trials were the only way we had of really improving patient cancer care—things like the one that Bernie Fisher in Pittsburgh started, the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project,” Lawrence said.
Read more and explore related archives at https://cancerhistoryproject.com/article/walter-lawrence-podcast/
In this episode, Susan Ellenberg, emerita professor of biostatistics, medical ethics, and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, describes her lifelong love of mathematics, how she accidentally became a biostatistician, and her well-rounded career in clinical trial design and analysis.
As a child, Ellenberg was fascinated by a mathematical puzzle.
John is twice Mary's age when John was Mary's age. When Mary will be John's age, the sum of their ages will be 63. How old are John and Mary?
Ellenberg occasionally chipped away at the question by randomly plugging in numbers, but she soon discovered another way to approach it.
“When I got to high school algebra, I learned that there was an actual way to solve this problem. I was so excited I knew how to do it,” Ellenberg said.
That enthusiasm, combined with her college entrance exam math scores—which topped her graduating class, despite not being in the math honors program—led her to become a math teacher.
But Ellenberg soon put her career on hold so she and her husband could start their young family.
However, when Ellenberg was pregnant with her first child, a friend asked if she could help with computer programming for a project under the eminent biostatistician Jerome Cornfield.
That job led to Ellenberg earning a PhD in mathematical statistics and having a career in clinical trial design and analysis. She has held positions at the Emmes Clinical Research Organization, NIH, and FDA. She also worked with activists during the AIDS epidemic and has combatted misinformation about vaccine safety.
Eventually, though, she took a job in academia and returned to her first passion: teaching.
“I said I would teach a class on clinical trials, which I did all the years until I became emeritus,” Ellenberg said. “I really enjoyed doing that, [going] back to my original love of teaching.”
Ellenberg spoke with McKenzie Prillaman, reporter at The Cancer Letter. A transcript of this conversation appears on the Cancer History Project.
To mark Hispanic Heritage Month, in this episode, six cancer experts discuss Latino representation in clinical trials, translational research, and healthcare professions.
Hispanic and Latino people comprise nearly 20% of the U.S. population, but less than 6% of physicians nationwide identify as Hispanic.
“The pipeline issue continues to be a huge issue for us,” said Amelie Ramirez, of UT Health San Antonio and Mays Cancer Center. “As our population continues to grow, in terms of the Latino population, we definitely need more [Latino physicians].”
Since trust plays a huge role in recruiting participants, the dearth of Latinos in health care affects clinical trials and translational research, said Cruz-Correa, of the University of Puerto Rico and PanOncology Trials. “For our patients, for our communities, language is still important—that concordance between the physician that is telling you about the study and the patient’s background.”
Still, it’s important to remember that Latinos are a very diverse group, who speak languages other than Spanish, said Carvajal-Carmona, of UC Davis. Latino people of the myriad ethnicities throughout the Americas have a variety of histories, cultures, and cancer risk factors, he said.
And for Latino professionals in oncology, it’s vital to continue making their presence known, said Edith Perez, of Mayo Clinic. “We are part of the population. We are part of the intellectual minds that exist in this nation. And we're here to help lead and collaborate.”
Panelists included:
A transcript of this conversation is available on the Cancer History Project.
In this episode, Lawrence Phillips, an endocrinologist at Emory Clinic, a professor at Emory University School of Medicine, and medical director of the Clinical Studies Center at the Atlanta VA Medical Center, discusses pushing through lung cancer to continue doing what he loves—seeing patients, teaching, and conducting research.
Something odd turned up in one of Phillips’s routine health screenings in 2008. A radiologist who was examining Phillips’s CT scan images to look at his coronary arteries noticed a mass in his left lung.
Phillips had previously been told not to worry about the mass because it wasn’t growing.
“Well, that’s not true,” Phillips recalled the radiologist saying. The tumor had, indeed, grown.
Three days later, Phillips had it removed via segmentectomy. He thought his lung cancer was over and done with.
But in 2014, his surgery scar had started to change. It lit up in a PET scan. So, Phillips had a lobectomy, after which he learned he had an EGFR mutation.
Eventually, Phillips began a treatment regimen gefitinib, which he still takes today. He is currently free of evidence of disease.
Phillips spoke with Deborah Doroshow, associate professor of medicine at the Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
A transcript of this conversation is available on the Cancer History Project.
In this episode, stay-at-home mom Christy Erickson discusses how she went from a roundabout lung cancer diagnosis to riding a motorcycle and competing in strongman competitions.
Erickson wasn’t worried about lung cancer when she was younger. Breast cancer had a stronghold on her family tree. Her mom died from it when Erickson was seven years old.
She took preventative measures for breast cancer, including a mastectomy. But a few years later, in 2006, scans for an unrelated health issue revealed spots all over Erickson’s lungs.
Her biopsy came back negative for cancer at the time. But 10 years later, she was diagnosed with stage 4 EGFR-positive lung cancer.
Receiving that news after dedicating years to prevention measures pushed Erickson down an emotional spiral.
But her condition stabilized with osimertinib. “I sort of hit this point where I thought, 'Well, I'm still here and I'm relatively healthy. If I'm not dying, I want to go live,’” she said.
Erickson spoke with Deborah Doroshow, assistant professor of medicine, hematology, and medical oncology at the Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
A transcript of this conversation is available on the Cancer History Project.
In this episode, 2024 David Karnofsky Memorial Award winner Lillian L. Siu reviews her career developing novel therapies in the phase I setting, the evolution of her field, and her mentor’s dreaded “evil red pencil.”
Siu was among the first scientists to read out the signals of safety, pharmacology, and preliminary efficacy of therapeutic agents that ushered in a new era of cancer therapy. She has been involved in the early development of over 50 drugs and has focused on ways to improve efficiency and scientific relevance of clinical trials.
Over the course of her career as a phase I clinical trialist, Siu watched as the field moved away from using “maximum tolerated dose,” the growing need for early-phase efficacy data, and the emergence of intermediate biomarkers.
After a nearly 30-year-long career, Siu’s advice for young oncologists is simple: Don’t give up.
“Learn from every mistake or every challenge and rise above it and be tenacious,” Siu said. “Be persistent, because there’s never an end that is a bad ending. It is always a good ending if you put enough effort in it. Maybe not entirely the way you want it, but at least if you put in the effort, something will return to you that is worth your effort. I truly believe in that, and certainly I see that in my career.
“I don’t only have positive results, I have very often negative results, but it’s fun. Learning from your mistakes is half of the fun, and cherish that kind of moment to learn from it.”
Siu spoke with Jacquelyn Cobb, reporter with The Cancer Letter. A transcript of the conversation appears on The Cancer History Project.
Something felt wrong during one of Morhaf Al Achkar’s regular runs on the treadmill in late 2016. He started gasping for breath.
“It became really hard to run,” he said. “That sudden development of shortness of breath alarmed me.”
Being a family physician in Indiana at the time, he asked a resident at the clinic where he worked to listen to his lungs. “There’s no air moving on the left side of your chest—that doesn’t seem right,” Al Achkar recalled hearing from the resident.
A few weeks later, Al Achkar received devastating news: he had stage 4 ALK-positive lung cancer. He estimated that he would live for just another six to 10 months.
But today—nearly eight years after his devastating diagnosis—Al Achkar is still working, now primarily as a researcher and educator.
Al Achkar spoke with Deborah Doroshow, assistant professor of medicine, hematology, and medical oncology at the Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
A transcript of this conversation is available on the Cancer History Project.
When Stephanie Graff was a breast oncology fellow in 2010, one of her patients brought a marked up copy of “Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book” to an appointment.
“One of my patients had brought it in and was using it almost as her cancer notebook, and had pages flagged and said, ’Well, what about this? What about this? It says here…,’” Graff, director of Breast Oncology at Lifespan Cancer Institute and medical advisor for the Dr. Susan Love Foundation for Breast Cancer Research, said to The Cancer Letter.
It was the first time that the book, written by Susan Love, a breast cancer surgeon, activist, and founder of the Dr. Susan Love Foundation for Breast Cancer Research, had shown up on Graff’s radar.
“Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book” was first published in 1990. Now, Graff is a contributing author of the seventh edition, the most recent version of the book published in 2023.
Graff spoke with Alexandria Carolan, associate editor of the Cancer History Project. A full transcript of this conversation, including how Graff came to know and work with Susan Love, appears on the Cancer History Project.
Soon after he was diagnosed with a dedifferentiated liposarcoma, C. Norman Coleman reached out to The Cancer Letter and the Cancer History Project to initiate a series of interviews about his life and career.
The plan was to keep going for as long as possible. Alas, only one interview–about an hour’s worth–got done. Coleman spoke with Otis Brawley and Paul Goldberg, co-editors of the Cancer History Project.
Coleman died March 1 at 79.
At NCI, Coleman was the associate director of the Radiation Research Program, senior investigator in the Radiation Oncology Branch in the Center for Cancer Research, and leader of a research laboratory at NIH. He was also the founder of the International Cancer Expert Corps, a non-profit he created to provide mentorship to cancer professionals in low- and middle-income countries and in regions with indigenous populations in upper-income countries.
This interview is available as a transcript on the Cancer History Project.
In this conversation, Vivian Pinn speaks with Robert Winn, guest editor of The Cancer Letter and the Cancer History Project during Black History Month, about the obstacles she faced as a medical student, how she incidentally helped integrate restaurants in Charlottesville in the 1960s, and her beginnings as a Research Fellow in Immunopathology at NIH.
Pinn was the only African American and the only woman in her class to graduate from the University of Virginia School of Medicine in 1967. In 1982, she was the first African American woman to chair an academic pathology department in the United States, at Howard University College of Medicine.
She went on to become the first full-time director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health at NIH in 1991.
In this conversation, Roderick Pettigrew speaks with Robert Winn, guest editor of The Cancer Letter and the Cancer History Project during Black History Month, about Pettigrew’s contributions to research, how he became an early self-taught expert on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or the MRI, as well as when he became founding director of National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.
Pettigrew is chief executive officer of Engineering Health (EnHealth) and inaugural dean for Engineering Medicine (EnMed) at Texas A&M University in partnership with Houston Methodist Hospital, and the Endowed Robert A. Welch Chair in Medicine and founding director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. Winn is the director and Lipman Chair in Oncology at VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center, and senior associate dean for cancer innovation and professor of pulmonary disease and critical care medicine at VCU School of Medicine.
As part of a series as a guest editor of the Cancer History Project to commemorate the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health, Alan Blum speaks with Louis Sullivan, who was Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from 1989 to 1993.
Alan Blum is professor and Gerald Leon Wallace M.D. Endowed Chair in Family Medicine at the University of Alabama, as well as the director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society.
Throughout his career, Sullivan made smoking prevention a high priority, condemning the tobacco industry for targeting African Americans and calling on sports organizations to reject tobacco sponsorship.
In 1975, Sullivan was named founding dean and director of the Medical Education Program at Morehouse College. In 1981, the four-year Morehouse School of Medicine was established with Sullivan as dean and president.
In this interview, Sullivan speaks about growing up in the segregated South, his early years in medicine while living in Boston, and the medical community’s response to tobacco in the aftermath of the 1964 surgeon general’s report.
Read more and access the transcript on the Cancer History Project: https://cancerhistoryproject.com/article/former-hhs-secretary-louis-sullivan-recalls-sinking-rjrs-uptown-a-menthol-brand-for-black-smokers/
In 1964, the Office of the Surgeon General issued a report on smoking and health that ended a debate that had raged for decades—stating that cigarettes cause lung cancer and other diseases.
Sixty years later, Alan Blum, professor and Gerald Leon Wallace M.D. Endowed Chair in Family Medicine at the University of Alabama, as well as the director of the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society, sits down with Donald S. Shopland, an original member of the staff of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General upon its formation in 1962.
Since 1962, Shopland has served as an editor of 17 reports of the surgeon general on smoking and health, as interim director of the Office on Smoking and Health for two years in the 1980s, and as an advisor on smoking and health at NCI. He retired in 2014.
You can read the transcript here.
George Santos, founder of Johns Hopkins University Bone Marrow Transplantation Program, pioneered many of the innovations used in bone marrow transplantation that are relevant today—but he didn’t get nearly as much credit as others working in the field.
Richard J. Jones, professor of oncology and medicine, director of the Bone Marrow Transplantation Program, and co-director, Hematologic Malignancies Program, at The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, spoke with the Cancer History Project about George Santos's legacy.
“Much of what we’re currently doing in bone marrow transplant internationally was developed by George,” Jones said.
A transcript of this conversation is available here.
In this episode, Judith L. Pearson, best-selling author and founder of A 2nd Act, speaks with Alexandria Carolan, associate editor with the Cancer History Project.
Delving deep into Mary Lasker’s role as the “catalytic agent” who worked behind the scenes through proxies to accomplish the goal of curing cancer, Pearson wrote “Crusade to Heal America: The Remarkable Life of Mary Lasker.”
“She just wanted to light the fire and then wanted everybody else to go to work to make it happen,” Pearson said to The Cancer Letter. “She would give them whatever resources were necessary, including some of her own money, to make sure that the right congressmen and senators held positions got reelected, or got elected, and then went into the appropriate committees.”
A transcript of this recording appears on the Cancer History Project.
At age 18, during basic training in Fort Polk, Louisiana, Chris Lundy slipped and broke his wrist.
At the hospital, the doctors set his wrist and ran some blood tests. What Lundy thought would be a simple visit turned into a series of months-long hospital stays.
Lundy was diagnosed with paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, and his doctors sent him to Seattle, where he would become a patient of Donnall Thomas. Thomas would share the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1990 discoveries concerning organ and cell transplantation in the treatment of human disease.
Today, Lundy is the longest living recipient of an allogeneic transplant for aplastic anemia at Fred Hutch Cancer Center. He received the bone marrow transplant that saved his life in 1971.
In this interview, Chris and his brother, Jerry Lundy, speak with Dr. Deborah Doroshow, an oncologist at the Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Doroshow, who is also a historian of medicine, is a member of the editorial board of the Cancer History Project.
Read more here: https://cancerhistoryproject.com/article/chris-lundy-had-one-week-to-live-52-years-later-he-is-the-longest-living-bmt-recipient-at-the-hutch/
What does it take to run an NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center for 22 years? And what does it takes to recruit a successor?
In this episode, Shelton “Shelley” Earp talks about his plans to step down as director of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center effective in June 2024. He is joined by Norman "Ned" Sharpless, former director of UNC Lineberger as well as former NCI director and former acting FDA commissioner. Sharpless chairs the committee charged with finding Earp’s successor.
Earp has served as director between 1997 and 2018 and then again from 2018 on, both preceding and succeeding Sharpless in the UNC job.
This is a special edition of the Cancer History Project podcast focused a little more on the present—and the future.
Read more here: https://cancerletter.com/conversation-with-the-cancer-letter/20230908_1/