Chapter 10: Organizing Multi-Disciplinary Research on South Campus
Files
Identifier
MendelsohnJ_01_20050103_C10
Publication Date
1-3-2005
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
John Mendelsohn, MD, Oral History Interview, January 03, 2005
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - Building the Institution; Building the Institution; Research; Definitions, Explanations, Translations; Discovery, Creativity and Innovation; Discovery and Success; On Research and Researchers; Professional Practice; The Professional at Work; Understanding Cancer, the History of Science, Cancer Research; The History of Health Care, Patient Care; Technology and R&D
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
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: In the case of pediatric cancers there’s a lot of organs around. You got a cancer in the abdomen, case of cancer melanoma in the eye. Where you want to give very high doses of radiation without hurting the surrounding tissue. That’s where the main advantages because when you give photo radiation, which is the energy from electrons changing orbits, as the photos travels through your body it’s releasing energy all the way through. You put an X-ray plate behind your body, you’ll get an x-ray. When protons are fired, for reasons that I do not understand, they release most of their energy when they stop. So they can calculate using simultaneous CT-scan what’s between the protons being generated in a fancy cyclotron fired at you they can calculate how much energy to put behind the proton so that if your tumor is 6 centimeters into your chest or 3 centimeters in your leg or your arm that amount of energy that will drive the proton to get to the point the tumor and stop because there’s enough tissue there to stop it and it releases almost all of its energy right there. It isn’t going to release energy on the way out and on the way in as much as photon would to. So that’s why you, you can give higher doses with less side effects. So for your particular tumor, the longer you wait to need it --maybe you’ll never need it, but as long as you needed to wait for that low grade glioma, the more were going to learn how to handle that. That’s the kind of research we’re going do in the unit. So that building is the fifth, let’s see we’ve covered. Oh then there’s a building already up there for metastasis: Dr. Fidler’s [oral history interview] Program. That’s the sixth building and that campus when it’s finished. I think that Dr. Kripke [oral history interview] estimates that a third of all our laboratory research will be going on at that campus. It’s very innovative because on this campus the research is organized departments are grouped together. But it turns people on a department have very different interests and their group together on that south campus by their intellectual interests. And in the metastasis center there are a lot of surgeons that have their labs there because the kind of research they’re doing is to try to block metastasis. They’re not in labs with the surgical department they’re in a lab with Dr. Fidler in metastasis unit. In the immunology building, we’ve got people from the bone marrow transplant and lymphoma and melanoma and the basic science immunologists all in a building together. And in the molecular markers building, we got people from laboratory medicine, the pathology department, and people from cancer medicine. Gordon Mills’ [oral history interview] Molecular Therapeutics Unit is really shifting into molecular diagnostics in a building together. In Dr.diGiovanni[?]’s looking at molecular building, there are going to be chemists in there because the molecules you spirt in when you do a PET scan. It’s like designing chemotherapy. You’re designing here a molecule that will go to a target and then disappear. In chemotherapy, you’re designing a molecule to go through a target and kill it. In this case, it’s the same principle. So he’s designing a whole pharmaceutical program, and there will be people in that building that are interested in that coming from a number of departments. The same will happen in the new targeted therapy building. So we’re organizing our research around the goal of the research rather than around what department you come from and people. Some people, may choose to stay on this campus and more people are moving down there. Before we designed this , there was a tremendous resistence to move to South Campus. But the buildings are attractive and the concept is attractive. And meanwhile the city’s building a bridge over Bray’s Bayou and we’re going to provide transportation back and forth, so that about a mile and half between the two, we’ll shrink it. It’ll be great if we’re all in one little place, but you can see how far apart our clinical program is to. It’s a 15 minute walk to get from, let’s say, that Clark Clinic to the clinic in the new ACB.
James Olson:
: You say reluctant just because they thought they were getting away from the main stadium?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: No. Getting away from their colleagues.
James Olson:
: Colleagues okay.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: Now if a third of their colleagues are going to be down there, it’s a moot point. It’s no longer an issue. Interesting challenges for me to try to orchestrate that. But I want you learn more about that because the South Campus imitative is very important. The Mitchell Building is very important for two reasons. Number one is it expands our basic sciences. But number two: we have the graduate school in that building. The Graduate School when Clark was here, there was a graduate school giving a degree. It was handed over to the Health Science Center. It’s a joint program but they gave the degree. About four years ago, we got permission to give degrees, and now we jointly sign the diploma. There’s an example of a diploma out there that was giving to me. Oops. We can’t walk. There’s an example of the diploma signed by me and Dr. Willerson[?]. It’s the first diploma signed by both of us. And the graduate school which is 500 students that we’re training in cancer research was located in facilities belonging to the Health Science Center. Now they’re located in facilities belonging to MD Anderson and they’re in the same building as our two strongest basic sciences programs. That building is a major project for MD Anderson because of the expansion of basic science in it and because the graduate school is right in it. And graduate students are critical to the mission of the institution both from the point of view of training and point of view of research they carry out. So these new buildings that are opening up --and obviously the ACB, the first prevention building that I know of its kind in the country. The ACB greatly expands our clinical program so a lot is happening here that culminates five years of planning to expand the program that will be complemented by complementary medicine. But I’m taking the opportunity to put a pitch in that those are important and of interest in the book too. The vision of expanding the translational research program and the faculty getting together what are going to be the important areas in developing the facilities to carry putthose areas: immunology and diagnostics and imaging and targeted therapeutics and metastases.
Recommended Citation
Mendelsohn, John MD, "Chapter 10: Organizing Multi-Disciplinary Research on South Campus" (2005). Interview Chapters. 1452.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1452
Conditions Governing Access
Open
