Chapter 08: Mentoring and Research
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Description
Dr. Levin briefly speaks about the role of a mentor and how his brother, Nathan, served as a mentor for him. He then tells a story about receiving a call from Burt Vogelstein at Johns Hopkins University regarding work on cytogenetics.
Identifier
LevinB_01_20130207_C08
Publication Date
2-7-2013
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Bernard Levin, MD, Oral History Interview, February 07, 2013
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Personal BackgroundProfessional Path Influences from People and Life Experiences Personal Background Mentoring
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
Bernard Levin, MD:
Before that—so much of my professional life. And then individuals at the University of Chicago in gastroenterology particularly, and to some extent, oncology, like John Ultmann and Joseph Kirsner, who are very well-known physicians were very helpful in some of the guidance. Then Irv Krakoff to some extent, as well. I also received discouraging feedback from one individual who is very well known in hematology oncology, and I won’t mention the name, but I told her when I was a research fellow at the University of Chicago that I was seriously interested in pursuing a career in gastrointestinal oncology. She said, “You’re crazy. There’s no future in that. That’s a dead end.” Because that was the perception in those days of what lay ahead. Now, compared to hematology, leukemia, lymphoma, the advances haven’t been as substantial or as breathtaking. But there have been many. And she was thinking more about the management of advanced malignancy rather than the prevention of early malignancy or treatment of early malignancy. So some of that was negative feedback or negative mentorship, but I disregarded her anyway.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
It shows how it’s really a delicate balance, I think. I mean, here you are, and you’re a young researcher, creative, trying to be innovating, wanting to make a name for yourself. And you’ve got to find that inner compass. You know—what is it that I want to accomplish? And use that as a way of gauging the incoming, “Don’t do this. Do this.” And decide how to sort through and take the right advice, that’s the right advice for you. So it’s a very complex kind of process. What made you know not to take that advice?
Bernard Levin, MD:
I think I had already made up my mind that I was going to face this challenge one way or another, either through learning about the management of more established malignancy or the prevention or treatment of early—this was the area I would go in. In some ways I thought it also wasn’t going to be a competitive area, because no one else wanted to do it. It was thought of as the backwater of the field. I saw an opportunity, which wasn’t there necessarily in some of these more competitive areas. I also felt I could do it without a lot of additional training, because there wasn’t a lot known. In a sense, now thirty or forty years later, it’s much more complicated. And one certainly couldn’t jump into that field without considerably more training, which I hadn’t received in that area. So in some senses it was opportunism.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And it was a time that was really ripe for that, given where medical oncology was, and the perfect storm that was coming together of information from genetics and molecular biology—and all of that coming together.
Bernard Levin, MD:
I have a very funny story to tell about that. One day I was sitting in my office at MD Anderson, and the secretary said there was a phone call from somebody at Johns Hopkins. This person proceeded to ask me some very pointed and specific questions about the work on cytogenetics. And he had read it obviously, and he knew exactly what he was talking about. And I had a hard time answering him, and I don’t think I left him with a very secure feeling that I really knew a great deal. This person turned out to be Bert Vogelstein who’s one of the—as we say—luminaries, giants of modern molecular medicine. And through a variety of circumstances we’ve actually stayed in very close contact, and I have written a couple papers with him of which I am a minor, minor author, including one by one of his fellows which was published in Science on trying to find something abnormal in the stool, which was the first identification of an oncogene in the stool. The first author on there was Sidransky. But my respect for him started on that day. But he’s now, obviously, one of the world’s most famous scientists. The work on cytogenetics was, in a sense, a forerunner to what he actually eventually did. But not directly on that path. But he is sometimes quoted as saying that there were early studies of this work, and he’s kind enough to cite this. He was able to utilize his many talents in genetics, mathematics, and bring them to bear on the understanding of colon cancer in a way that no one else had ever done.
Recommended Citation
Levin, Bernard MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 08: Mentoring and Research" (2013). Interview Chapters. 1344.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1344
Conditions Governing Access
Open
