Chapter 09: The Elements of a Researcher’s Life: From Research Approaches to Novel Ways of Supporting Patients
Files
Description
In this Chapter Dr. Pollock comments on the life of a researcher, beginning with his personal experience of working alongside his (second) wife, Dr. Dina Chelouche Lev, in a laboratory established around a core set of values they share as surgical oncologists. He describes Dr. Lev’s working style and commitment to surgical oncology as both a vocation and avocation, noting shifts in his role vis a vis his field as his administrative demands increased.
Dr. Pollock also mentions an unusual step he has taken to secure support for sarcoma research: bringing interested patients about to have sarcoma surgery into the research laboratory. It’s important, he says, so patients can see how their tissue is actually going to be studied and also so that researchers (some with no clinical training) actually connect tumor tissue to real human beings. In addition, patients can become interested in supporting sarcoma research financially. He tells a touching anecdote about a patient (with metastatic liposarcoma) asked to volunteer in the lab. He eventually died and the entire laboratory was invited to attend his funeral –and did attend. At the end of this Chapter, Dr. Pollock observes that the life of a full-time researcher can be very lonely.
Identifier
PollokRE_02_20121010-C09
Publication Date
10-10-2012
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Raphael Pollock, MD, Oral History Interview, October 10, 2012
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - The ResearcherThe Researcher Professional Practice The Professional at Work Collaborations Overview Definitions, Explanations, Translations Understanding Cancer, the History of Science, Cancer Research Discovery and Success Multi-disciplinary Approaches Building/Transforming the Institution On Research and Researchers The Life and Dedication of Clinicians and Researchers Volunteers and Volunteering Donations, Gifts, Contributions Institutional Mission and Values Healing, Hope, and the Promise of Research Human Stories
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:
I wondered if I could switch gears for just a second and talk about the fact that you are working in this laboratory with your wife. What is your working style and how does that all work?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Well, it actually, I think, works very, very well. Before my wife became a full-time sarcoma laboratory researcher, she was a sarcoma surgical oncologist, so the fundamental commitment was to do research that directly or indirectly might benefit patients. So that was a nice common core understanding. The desire to have a variety of different types of investigators all under one roof was likewise shared. She’s originally from Israel, so the interest in having a very international laboratory was part of what fueled our desire as well. And we’ve had investigators and students from over twenty countries at this point, so that’s been a really very gratifying and fun part of the experience. And Dina works very, very hard and keeps surgical hours. Monday through Friday—most days of the week—we are actually at work by 5:30 in the morning. The hours extend into the early evening typically. And then on the weekends we’re in the laboratory as well. For her, this is both a vocation as well as an avocation. For me, particularly as I acquired more administrative responsibilities and more clinical responsibilities, I was no longer in a position to be as much on the front line or the cutting edge. But my role, because of other professional activities such as my involvement in writing and editing textbooks and journals, focused more on preparing grants and manuscripts, editing what was written by others in the laboratory, participating in laboratory meetings—both for my own education, frankly, but also as someone who has done a lot of grant reviewing—to be able to ask probing, intelligent questions to help other people in the group develop more cohesive applications for extramural funding, for example.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, I was going to ask you how your work influenced—how you influenced each other workwise.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Well, it’s been a tremendous source of pleasure and accomplishment. Dina is extremely task oriented and focused, and so she approaches a problem in a very systematic way. As I mentioned, in sarcoma, there are at least fifty and maybe as many as 100 different biological entities, so one of the shared commitments that we made was before we start studying one or another molecular biological aspects of a given tumor system, that we first document our own clinical results here at Anderson, knowing that in so doing we may identify specific clinical questions that are unique to one or another of the histologies that then leads to the desire to probe this in the laboratory. And by having this large tissue repository, we can quickly pull out frozen tissues that we have preserved over the years for a given subtype and then ask questions out of that subtype.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So you said that Dr. Lev is very task oriented and focused and she approaches problems in a systematic way. How would you characterize your approach as a researcher?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
I would characterize it as being very similar.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Do you have different kind of—in terms of your style of innovative thinking or creative thinking, do you see differences in the way you have aha moments?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Well, the most obvious difference is that she’s about twice as smart as I am. She’s extremely intuitive, a remarkable autodidact, and she pushes herself very, very hard. So those are all really important characteristics, which have, I think, made her into a very effective lab chief.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Are those qualities that you look for in general when you’re looking to recruit people?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Yeah, if I— Putting aside the fact that this was my wife, this would be the type of individual that I would have wanted to recruit to this effort—someone who believed in the importance of clinically relevant research, had very high energy, could organize projects quickly, understood the absolute necessity of being able to publish your results and not let things just smolder, and constantly asking the next echelon of questions—very keen, probing, and inquisitive mind. And yet someone who understood the unfortunate clinical realities which we all too often have to confront in what we do on a day-to-day basis.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
You mentioned someone who understood the need to not let things smolder but go ahead and publish. Is that something that you see in some lab—that people kind of take longer than they should to publish?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Oh, yeah. Part of the problem is that you may start down a line of investigation and not bring it to its ultimate conclusion for whatever reason. Sometimes it’s technical problems. Sometimes the original hypothesis did not fit as you gathered more and more research results. But Dina has the unusual ability to keep in mind the experiments that have been done before, even as she’s supervising the work of fifteen or twenty other people, and see the threads that might connect one set of results in one project to another set of results in another project. So instead of just putting the results in a desk drawer with a promissory note that I may take a look at these in two or three years, the unpublished results are always there, and looking at how they might be connected to each other as a way of completing a story has been very, very useful.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That kind of integrative thinking across different domains—information.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Exactly. That’s something I’m not able to do myself, at least not at the same level.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. Different people approach questions, and they bring a different force—intellectual force—to them, so it’s interesting to see how people approach these problems differently and how they create teams out of that too.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
The other aspect of my role in this research program is that I have the opportunity to work with many, many patients who are extremely interested in research activities and/or are grateful for the clinical results that have been achieved by the sarcoma team. These individual frequently are very interested in becoming philanthropists to support the laboratory, and so we have the opportunity to work with patients and families to help with that, which is one way of bridging some of the gaps that exist in the research funding portfolios of extramural agencies.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow. Yeah. It’s a real commitment. It’s very important. Is there anything more that you’d like to say about the research dimension of your activities at this point—something I’ve missed? CLIP A: The Researcher B: Institutional Mission and Values C: Healing, Hope, and the Promise of Research D: On Philanthropy and Volunteerism C: Patients C: Patients, Treatment, Survivors C: Human Stories Bringing Patients into the Sarcoma Research Laboratory
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Well, there’s some very simple things—ostensibly simple—that I think may give you a little bit of a feel for some of the unique approaches. I will frequently bring a patient who is going to have surgery to the lab in advance of their operation. So, this accomplishes several different things. It helps the patient see that the tissues that we’re asking their consent to provide will be used for a very productive purpose, and it also gives the researchers in the lab, many of whom are not physicians, the opportunity to see that the tissues that they’re working with actually derive from another human being. It’s a part of their body, albeit a part that they would like to discard or have removed, but it’s still, without sounding smarmy, a very sanctified relationship, and the people in the lab are so incredibly grateful to the patients for having this opportunity to meet them directly. This is obviously not something for all patients, but for people whom I sense would feel this to be of benefit, it’s been very moving, and many of these individuals, parenthetically, become interested later on in helping the research lab move forward with some of the projects, particularly the projects that are focusing on their disease.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, makes them not only hopeful that they will be cured but something beyond them will continue—something great that will come out of this terrible situation. What are some of the other approaches? You said there were a few simple things that you do.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Well, that’s probably the most important approach. We took that whole philosophy to the extreme a number of years ago. I had a patient who had metastatic liposarcoma, but the disease was indolent but progressive. This was an individual who had had a very senior position in Southwestern Bell and had to retire and go on disability because of their liposarcoma problem. This individual came to me and said, “I’m looking for something to do. Can I be a volunteer in the lab?” So we were able to work that out, and because of his administrative acumen, he was able to totally reorganize our tissue repository and put it in a barcode system and set up a whole tissue procurement network. And for the last four years of his life, he worked as a volunteer in the lab and became very closely integrated, came to our Chinese New Year parties. Again, it was very, very meaningful to everyone in the lab, knowing that this was someone who was going to die of the disease that they were studying. He had a number of operations performed by me during the time that he was in the lab, so the tissues were used in a very direct fashion. And I think the value of this as bringing home the message that whether you’re in research or clinical care, if you work here, it’s ultimately about people trying to help take care of other people. It brought it home in a very, very direct way that cut through every layer of pretense and pretension both. It was a very, very meaningful relationship for all of us. The entire lab was invited and went to his funeral—the entire group. And so that’s something that I would hazard to guess to say that most research labs, even in an institution like MD Anderson, the people who are in the research program probably have not have many of these types of opportunities—very meaningful.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s a great outgrowth of that philosophy that you began to hone pretty early in your career about making a direct connection with people. That’s a great story. Is there anything else you’d like to share right now about the research dimension?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
It’s a good fight, and it’s worth fighting. The results are always slower than what we would like them to be. One of my favorite throwaway lines to our fellows is, “Even the most rusted of lug nuts will crack under the steady application of torque.” The failure will only be when we stop putting our hands on the monkey wrench to try to torque it in the right direction, and that’s not about to happen.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I guess you have to learn a lot of patience to keep on with the small steps to real groundbreaking knowledge.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Well, research and being a full-time researcher, which I am not and never have been at any point in my career, is a very difficult and frequently very lonely life. It’s all-consuming. There are always things that you need to do. It’s hard at times to just sit back and say, “I have squared the circle and now I can stop what I’m doing and do something else,” because there’s always something else. And you have to both have the vision, have the ability to teach yourself constantly, and stay one step ahead of the people you’re trying to teach to be able to teach them as well. So it requires development of, in some ways, a very tolerant persona, which is hard to sustain when there’s so much pressure to be productive in an individual sense. Publish or perish, if you don’t have a grant you have to—you know—forty percent of your salary underwritten by research grants, and that’s a very generously small percentage here at Anderson compared to other institutions. It’s a very competitive arena, and I think that being able to live with the pragmatic reality that it’s very competitive on the one hand, and on the other hand, in its best form, it’s as pure as Plato’s Academy. There’s a fair amount of dynamic tension between those two forces, and how to bridge those gaps is not easy. I have tremendous admiration for people who have chosen the full-time laboratory investigator path, because it’s very hard, and it’s unfortunately, in some ways compared to other societies, not an activity that receives the same social and financial perks and benefits that many other types of activities in our society receive, and yet it is so absolutely critical to how we will be able to continue to survive and thrive as the human race.
Recommended Citation
Pollock, Raphael E. MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 09: The Elements of a Researcher’s Life: From Research Approaches to Novel Ways of Supporting Patients" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1321.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1321
Conditions Governing Access
Open
