Chapter 06: Collaborations with Dr. R. Lee Clark and the Climate for Research at MD Anderson
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Description
In this segment, Dr. Hill talks about the research connections he shared with Dr. R. Lee Clark, also a thyroid surgeon. He talks about standard procedures for treating thyroid cancers. Dr. Hill concludes the interview with some comments on how basic and clinical scientists collaborated very informally during his first years at MD Anderson.
Identifier
HillCS_01_20120214_C06
Publication Date
2-14-2012
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
C. Stratton Hill, MD, Oral History Interview, February 14, 2012
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - The Researcher; Discovery and Success; Definitions, Explanations, Translations; The Researcher; The Clinician; Collaborations; Institutional Politics; Portraits
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay, I turned the recorder on after a brief break, and you were telling me about what Dr. Clark was saying to you.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
He said to me—and this is the Mayo Clinic philosophy, too, is that you—basically, I’m paraphrasing. It’s not a quote. You have your niche here. If you see something that you think we ought to do, it’s a viable, doable situation, or I think it is, we’ll make everything possible for you to get that done. That was basically what he told everybody. And of course, the fact that I began to do things with the thyroid— See, he was a thyroid surgeon, and that was his main interest. I don’t know what the other guys had done here, but I began to do things, and right off they made it known that I couldn’t do that unless I got Dr. Clark’s permission, because anything that had to do with the thyroid, he had to have something to do with it. That was no problem as far as I was concerned. It didn’t matter to me. So one of the things that he was doing with the pathologists was studying whole organ sections of thyroids, because looking at thyroid cancer, there would be a nodule in one lobe of the thyroid, and you take that lobe out, and then they were finding that the other lobe would come up with thyroid cancer later on. They began to do total thyroidectomies and doing whole organ sections. He did that with Dr. Russell, who was the pathologist here, Dr. Bill Russell, and that was one of his main interests at that time. Well, what I was doing was more medically oriented, but that got into some pretty touchy situations politically because some of the things that they were espousing were maybe not necessary later on, as they found out later on. It was kind of— That was no big problem. One of the things that I did that related to what we were doing at Anderson— And actually, Dr. Rawson, in New York, claimed that pregnancy was bad for anybody who had thyroid cancer. And I thought, “Hey, where’s the data on that?” And so when I began seeing some patients at Anderson, young women, they had been pregnant, and they’d had babies, and they seemed to be fine. So I did an epidemiological study, and basically it was a retrograde study. I wrote letters to— We sent out letters to women who had thyroid cancer to see if they’d been pregnant, if they were no longer coming to Anderson. Most of them were still coming, so we found out that there didn’t seem to be any relationship between pregnancy and thyroid cancer. I said to him, “Well, wait a minute. That’s my boss.” But I submitted that paper to the—I think it was called the Fifth International Thyroid Conference in Rome in 1965, and it was accepted. So I presented that, and Dr. Clark presented one of the papers relating to whole organ sections of the thyroid. And we had simultaneous translations there. Dr. Clark had kind of a southern drawl to his talking, but for some reason he got to talking so fast that the guy had to say, “Hey, slow down.” I thought, “My gosh, if we have to slow Dr. Clark down—” (laughs) That was kind of— I had to— I didn’t mind putting Dr. Clark’s name on all the papers because he had basically made it so that we could do all this stuff, and he got very much interested particularly in the medullary carcinoma thing. There’s a pamphlet that Anderson put out. I think this must be in the ‘60s. You’ve probably seen it. It’s a blue one. I had an article in there that had—I’ve got it upstairs—where I’d drawn a pedigree of—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
No, I haven’t seen that.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
And those are old, old things. I think it was the chancellor of the University of Texas at Austin was named Rawson, R-A-W-S-O-N, I think, or R-O-S-S-O-N. R-A-W-S-O-N was Dr. Rawson. That was my boss in New York, and there’s a chancellor at the University of Texas. I think it was called The Texan at Houston, which is a newspaper or something at the University of Texas in Austin, and that was in that particular thing. I may have some things that you don’t have that go back like that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, I’d be interested, if you have those. I wanted to ask you, though, what came of that study about the connection between pregnancy and thyroid cancer? I mean, has it been borne out that there is no connection?
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
No connection.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
No connection.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Yeah. It’s not mentioned anymore. Dr. Rawson quit doing that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I wanted to ask you a theme that’s come up in some of the other interviews. It’s the difference between, or relationship between, basic research and clinical research. There are some physicians and some researchers who have felt that it’s almost as though clinical research is a bit of a poor cousin, and I’m wondering what your thoughts are or what your experience was with that.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
I think basically— You were talking about the poor cousin to pure bench research? Yeah, well, the two things that I see is there is a lot of clinical research, and it may seem non-molecular to the basic scientists when you’re studying mechanisms of action and things of that sort. I think they are co-equal myself. I don’t see that there’s any— I mean, we were doing electron microscopy, but it was like the poor cousin. I’d just go in and talk to a guy and say, “Hey, will you do this for me?” And it was kind of a personality-basis-type of thing. Mike Ahearn [Oral History Interview] is still around. He’s the dean of sciences now.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Actually, he retired.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Oh, did he?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
He did.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
He ought to. (laughs) He’s the one who did the electron microscopy on those things. His name is on those papers.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So he was your—? You collaborated.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Yeah, but it was no real formal thing. I mean, he was in the Department of Pathology, but he had a lab right across the hall, and we’d go to lunch every day. They had a— Well, there used to be a building that Anderson had over there called the Anderson Mayfair, and that imploded several years ago. It’s where the faculty building is now. But we set it up as a hotel later on, and there was a faculty club over there. We’d go over there and have lunch almost every lunch at the faculty club, and that was a great experience. Mike Ahearn was the guy that did the electron microscopy, and he did that along with the other stuff, just had to kind of push it in and do that. And heck, my gosh, when we first got here, we didn’t have the pharmacy, all the fluids and everything. We had to mix those up ourselves. I mean, if I wanted a 20 percent glucose solution, I made it up, and I usually made it up on the floor. I’d take some vials of glucose, calculate out how much glucose I needed to put in that vial, and just squirt it in there and get it done. So we didn’t have this pharmacy that did all that stuff for us at that time. We did all kinds of things like that, collaborating and all that business, with David Anderson, the geneticist. We traced that family back to Czechoslovakia. That one time, I was going to Europe, and I was going to go to Czechoslovakia, but that was after the Communists came in there. I remember we were going through Bratislava, but we decided we were going to do that when I went to give that talk in Vienna. I drove—no, no, no. Oh, yeah, went to Budapest. We drove from Vienna to Budapest, and we were going to stop in Bratislava, but then they were stopping you, and you spent hours and hours and hours at the border. I remember when we got to the Hungarian border; we had to go off over here, and there were guys with machine guns, and they said, “Open up the hood of the car.” It was a rental car, and I didn’t know how to get it open and things like that. I didn’t get to see the people in Czechoslovakia. We did go back through— We then drove to Budapest, stayed there a while, and then drove down and went through Yugoslavia. That was when Tito was in power. I guess that kind of brings us up to when I went into the administrative stuff.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, do you want to break off for today then, and we can take up with that subject next time? It’s getting pretty late.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Yeah, and we’re going to have to go to see a friend whose granddaughter had triplets.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, well, that’s nice.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
We’re going to Mercury Baroque tonight. Do you know about the—? There’s a baroque music group here.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, I think I’m going to be going on Sunday.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Oh, you’re going Sunday? That’s going to be at the—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
At Rice.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Oh, at Rice [University]?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. Well, let me just turn off the recorder. It’s about 25 minutes of 5:00, and turning off the recorder for today. Thank you very much for spending the time.
C. Stratton Hill, MD:
Well, you’re quite welcome. (end of audio session 1)
Recommended Citation
Hill, C. Stratton Jr. MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 06: Collaborations with Dr. R. Lee Clark and the Climate for Research at MD Anderson" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1045.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1045
Conditions Governing Access
Open
