Chapter 1: MD Anderson Culture and Faculty
Files
Description
Dr. Kleinerman begins this chapter by explaining that she came to MD Anderson from the NCI in the early eighties because she was interested in running clinical trials with children diagnosed with osteosarcoma and was unable to do so at the NCI. She recalls her colleagues’ reactions when she said she was going to Texas and notes that despite the growth of MD Anderson’s reputation, there is a lingering perception that the institution is not as good as those in the East and in California. She tells an anecdote that indicates the perception that “we’re yokels.” She notes that MD Anderson never aspired to have the same structure as an academic institution because of the strong focus on cancer and translational research. “We don’t want to be a Harvard, a Yale, a Stanford.”
Identifier
KleinermanES_01_20140521_C01
Publication Date
5-21-2014
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Eugenie Kleinerman, MD, Oral History Interview, May 21, 2014
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - OverviewProfessional Path Joining MD Anderson The MD Anderson Brand, Reputation On Texas and Texans Critical Perspectives on MD Anderson On Research and Researchers MD Anderson Culture Institutional Politics The Researcher MD Anderson Impact Discovery, Creativity and Innovation
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
—put on the identifier and then we’ll be ready to go. All right. So we are recording at this point, and let me just quickly read the identifier for the record. The time is two minutes after two p.m. It is the 21st of May, 2014, and I’m Tacey Ann Rosolowski. And today I’m interviewing Dr. Eugenie Kleinerman for the Making Cancer History Voices Oral History Project run by the Research Medical Library at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. Dr. Kleinerman was recruited to MD Anderson in 1984 as an assistant professor in the Departments of Pediatrics. Is that correct?
Eugenie Kleinerman, MD:
Actually, I was assistant professor in the Department of Cancer Biology, with a joint appointment in Pediatrics.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay. All right. I will make a note of that. Thank you. And today she holds the Mary V. and John A. Reilly Distinguished Chair, and that is in Pediatrics.
Eugenie Kleinerman, MD:
Pediatrics.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay. She also has a joint appointment with the Department of Cancer Biology. Since 2001, Dr. Kleinerman has headed the Division of Pediatrics, and I will note that she’s the first woman to head a division at MD Anderson. This session is being held in Dr. Kleinerman’s office in the Division of Pediatrics in the Main Building on the main campus of MD Anderson, and this is the first of our interview sessions together. So thank you again for making the time for me.
Eugenie Kleinerman, MD:
My pleasure. My pleasure.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And before we turned on the recorder--we kind of did that abruptly because you were talking about the perceptions of MD Anderson in the national scene--and you were beginning to tell me about someone in pharmacology. So thank you for letting me interrupt you with these details. (laughs)
Eugenie Kleinerman, MD:
Well, you know, I like to tell stories, so I’ll start with a story by really how I got here. I had always been interested in the immune system and actually was fellow at the National Cancer Institute doing research in immunology, had no notion that I would go into cancer. I was a pediatrician. And we can talk about it later how I got into it, but anyway, there came a point in my career where I had this idea, after meeting with Dr. Fidler, to put an immune-therapy into a clinical trial for children with relapsed plastiosarcoma in the lung, and it became very clear to me that they really were not interested in the NCI with developing new treatments for children with cancer. I mean, they said they would, but there were so many roadblocks. Sam Broder was head of—I think he was head of the DCT, which is the Division of Cancer Treatment. This was like in 1983.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And that was here at MD Anderson?
Eugenie Kleinerman, MD:
Well, no, that was at the National Cancer Institute.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, okay. Sorry.
Eugenie Kleinerman, MD:
I was there as a fellow. Well, I had become a senior investigator, so I was like a faculty position. there was, “Well, first, you have to do this Eugenie, and then you have to do this.” So I came home and I said to my husband, “You know, if I’m ever going to be able to follow my dream, no way I can do it here.” And that’s when Dr. Fidler was recruited here to be head of Cancer Biology, and he asked me to join him.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow.
Eugenie Kleinerman, MD:
So when we told our friends that we were moving to Houston, Texas—and both my husband and I had the equivalent of tenured positions at the National Cancer Institute—people’s response were, “Are you crazy? You’re leaving Washington, D.C., the National Cancer Institute, to go to Houston, Texas, to MD Anderson, that cowboy state, that institution that is always out there doing crazy things?” So that was the perception, and I think, obviously, the reputation of MD Anderson has increased over the thirty years that I’ve been here, but there clearly is still a perception that we’re not as good as the institutions in the Northeast or the West, on the West Coast. And so what I was starting to tell you was there was a very distinguished professor of pharmacology from a topnotch institution in New York who came here to give a lecture, and Dr. Travis had a luncheon for women who—physician scientists, who were physicians but they do basic research as well. So we had a discussion, lovely young people, young women there doing terrific research, and we all went around the table telling her what we did. I’ve known her for over thirty years. She said, “I am so amazed that there’s such talent around this table.” And I thought to myself, “Isn’t that typical?” I said to her—and we’ll just call her Mary—“Mary, I am so tired of hearing that philosophy from you northeasterners. You’ve got to get over yourself.” And that is still the perception. People come here and they think, you know, we’re yokels, we don’t know quality, we’re not as good. And that is just so far from the truth.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Does that attitude have an effect on people’s careers, on the effectiveness of MD Anderson individuals as they go out in the world? What’s the impact of all that?
Eugenie Kleinerman, MD:
I don’t think it has an effect on the impact of MD Anderson, because we know that we’re good and we’re topnotch in certainly clinical trials and cancer treatment. Our basic science has never been as good—I don’t want to say “good”—on the same level as in the East Coast universities and the West Coast, because we’re not a university. We’re a cancer hospital. And I think we’ve prided ourselves in doing the type of research that moves clinical trials forward. I think those of us who came here thirty years ago never wanted to have the same structure as an academic university, be it East, West Coast, Central, whatever. Our basic science was meant to focus on cancer and translation, and there are many of us here today that remain of the philosophy that we don’t want to be a Harvard, a Yale, a Stanford. Our identity is MD Anderson and the fabulous clinical research and translational research and the breakthroughs in cancer therapies that we are famous for. And if we don’t have any Nobel laureates, that’s fine, and if we only have a few members at the Institute of Medicine, that’s fine. That’s not what makes this institution great. We don’t value ourselves by saying we have all of these people in the National Academy or Nobel laureates or whatever. That’s not the philosophy, I think, of our new leadership.
Recommended Citation
Kleinerman, Eugenie S. MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 1: MD Anderson Culture and Faculty" (2014). Interview Chapters. 1397.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1397
Conditions Governing Access
Open
