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 wo ..read more

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 ..read more

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 S ..read more

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 Hospita ..read more

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 c ..read more

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 ..read more

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 l ..read more

John Laszlo, professor emeritus at Duke University Medical Center and former national vice president for research at the American Cancer Society, speaks with the Cancer History Project’s Alex Carolan and Paul Goldberg about his life, career, and his authoritative book, “The Cure of Childhood Leukemia: Into the Age of Miracles.” When Laszlo, 92, joined the Acute Leukemia Service at NCI in 1956, the cure for childhood leukemia seemed beyond reach. He worked directly with Emil “Tom” Frei, and Emil J Freireich—early researchers and doctors of childhood leukemia at NCI. Laszlo’s book is based on ta ..read more

This episode features a recording of a March 7 Women’s History Month panel on the topic of Betty Ford,  Nancy Reagan, and how their cancer diagnoses impacted a nation. The panel was introduced by Monica Bertagnolli, MD, director of the National Cancer Institute, and moderated by Stacy Wentworth, MD, assistant professor of radiation oncology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and Medical director of cancer survivorship at Atrium Wake Forest Baptist Health Comprehensive Cancer Center. Bertagnolli and Wentworth were joined by Mirelle Luecke, MA, PhD, Supervisory museum curator of t ..read more

In July, the Cancer History Project is focusing on the founders of cancer centers. In this conversation, Jerome Yates tells us how he helped build Vermont Cancer Center. For Yates, a Joe Simone quote comes to his mind when reflecting on his days in Vermont:  “when you’ve seen one cancer center, you’ve seen one cancer center.” University of Vermont received a planning grant in 1974 to develop a cancer center in Vermont at a time when funds were flowing from NCI. Yates also received a rehabilitation grant from NCI for patients with advanced cancer—which helped develop a clinical infrastruct ..read more