
Chapter 03: Looking for Research Opportunities at MD Anderson
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Description
Dr. Keating begins this chapter by explaining that, in Australia at the time, chemotherapy was first being used to treat solid tumors. He explains his decision to come to the United States and the financial conditions of his fellowship.
Identifier
KeatingM_01_20140513_C03
Publication Date
5-13-2014
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Joining MD Anderson/Coming to Texas; Joining MD Anderson; The Researcher; Understanding Cancer, the History of Science, Cancer Research
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:
All right. So, we are recording again after about a three-minute pause. So, tell me how—we’ve kind of moved into that digression after talking about how you ended up coming to MD Anderson. So how did that happen?
Michael Keating, MD:
Well, because I was interested in malignant hematology, and the chemotherapy of solid tumors was really just starting at that time in Australia in the seventies, and most of the successes were in hematology, but they were starting to get some responses in in breast cancer, so that I thought eventually there would be successes in a number of solid tumors. So I thought I’d come for a couple of years to the United States because I realized that that was way ahead of what was happening in the United Kingdom, which was the other potential training facility that was utilized by Australians. So, I looked at some of the journals, Cancer, etc., and sent off applications to all the major places doing chemotherapy research in cancer. Everyone thought that it was a great idea to have an assistant professor become a fellow because it was cheap labor for someone that had expertise and experience, and the MD Anderson was the only place that said, “Not only will we have you, but we’ll actually pay you,” because all of the others said they would love to have you, bring your own money, and there wasn’t any money to be had. And I think it’s probably partly because Dr. Burgess was here and probably Dr. Freireich said, “Do you know anything about this guy Keating?” And he said, “Yeah, he was one of my students back then, and he’s pretty good.” So I arrived, and it was very dramatic coming over here because all the correspondence were sent by snail mail, even longer, in that it was sent by sea mail, so not airmail, so that we were all ready to start work on July the 1st, except that the papers didn’t come through until a week before we were due to leave. So we were running around getting everything done with the U.S. Embassy, etc., etc., and we arrived at midnight on the 1st of July into the middle of a Houston summer from an Australian winter, with my wife and four kids aged two through six, and had to get settled into this strange world.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And it was 1974, just for—
Michael Keating, MD:
1974. Then there was another Australian here at that time, Dr. Gary Spitzer. He’d arrived the year before I did, and he picked me up from the motel that we were staying at, and I came in. So we settled into the motel at around about, oh, one-thirty in the morning, and I started work at eight o’clock that morning. Everyone was expected to introduce themselves, and everyone’s going around, and then Freireich points to me and said, “Hello. Who are you?” I said, “I’m Dr. Michael Keating.” And he said, “We weren’t expecting you. We thought it would be another two or three months.” And the thought that came to me was, “My god, they’re not going to pay me for three months. How are we going to survive?” and all that sort of stuff. It was a very scary time.
Recommended Citation
Keating, Michael MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 03: Looking for Research Opportunities at MD Anderson" (2014). Interview Chapters. 1171.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1171
Conditions Governing Access
Open
