"Have you found the cure for cancer yet?"
I remember being greeted by a friend when she saw me for the first
time at the lobby of the BST research center at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center with the question,
"Have you found the cure for cancer yet?" . It was her
welcome for me in the form of this popular joke into this place where studies
right and left are done to do just that. Find a cure for cancer.
It was a short three month stint at this prestigious place as part
of an NIH minority grant and I learned a lot and among them is good things take
time. And one more thing. The scientists do not necessarily chase that
lofty goal of finding a cure at first but something less sublime and at times
more in the form of fulfilling a challenge for personal satisfaction. Sometimes
they just got to do it to fulfill the objective in the grant they have fundings from. For the younger ones, it might be to fulfill the requirements of the degree
they are working for. But always the curiosity and the thrill of finding out
whatever they are seeking for were there.
I remember a story about a writer who visited the large
pharmaceutical company that produced Prozac to thank the chemist who discovered
the synthesis of this anti depression drug. He profusely thanked the scientist
whose discovery had helped lifted him from the debilitating disease. The
scientist just looked at him and deadpan said, I just did it because I wanted
to do it.
I have done research related to curing cancer including the one
for my MS degree at George Washington University (GWU) in the seventies. It was attaching fluorine instead of
the tiny hydrogen unto a molecule that resembles the one in 5-Flurouracil (5
FU), one of the most effective cancer drugs to date. I never thought that
ten years later after I was done with my degree at GWU I would reconnect with
this endeavour in some manner when I went home in the Philippines years later to be with my father who had terminal liver cancer.
I remember being asked to stay behind by my father's oncologist
after his appointment with him was done. In his office he showed me the XRAY of
my father's liver where you can see holes the size of a quarter spread out in
this malignant tissue. For drama, he showed me the XRAY of another person's
liver with hardly any of it left.
He was an opportunist, thinking we had money and asked if we
would go for broke to find measures in the United States to find a cure for my father.
I asked what the odds were in his experience and he mentioned how one of
his patients who he accompanied in the plane to the US was resurrected by 5-FU.
Hearing 5-FU brought me back to my research at GWU.
Going back to the car where my father was waiting, I had to lie to
my father to explain my absence. I told him that I met a classmate from
high school who was now a doctor at the hospital and chatted with her. Then I
could not help it, I told him I talked to his oncologist but did not tell him
everything. I just proudly told him I tried to synthesize a compound that
mimics the effect of 5-FU that his doctor said was a miraculous drug cure for
cancer. I saw him beam with pride.
I never got to make that compound or any other in my whole career
to cure cancer but I feel the satisfaction almost tantamount to a discovery by
making my father happy and proud that day for attempting to do it.
My father died a few months later. We did not go for broke
to bring him to the US for the cure and the oncologist did not get his free trip
to the United States either. For myself, I found a loftier reason for why I was
doing what I did and would later on.
