"Chapter 08: A Landmark Conference on Cancer Survivorship and Parenthoo" by Leslie Schover PhD and Tacey A. Rosolowski PhD
 
Chapter 08: A Landmark Conference on Cancer Survivorship and Parenthood

Chapter 08: A Landmark Conference on Cancer Survivorship and Parenthood

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Description

In this chapter, Dr. Schover explains that in 2004, she and others at MD Anderson wrote a conference grant to bring together basic scientists and individuals in psychological fields to discuss cancer and parenthood at a landmark conference that furthered the field of onco-fertility. She explains the issues involved in this topic and also explains that two conference participants has authored embargoed papers, attesting to the national significance of the topic. Dr. Schover explains that this conferenced spurred collaborations across disciplines and that the conference proceedings were published in 2005, the same year a follow-up conference was held. She also comments on the

Identifier

SchoverL_02_20181004_C08

Publication Date

10-4-2018

City

Houston, Texas

Topics Covered

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - Building the Institution; Definitions, Explanations, Translations; Survivors, Survivorship; Patients, Treatment, Survivors; Understanding Cancer, the History of Science, Cancer Research; The History of Health Care, Patient Care; Building/Transforming the Institution; Multi-disciplinary Approaches; Growth and/or Change; Obstacles, Challenges; Institutional Politics; Professional Practice; The Professional at Work

Transcript

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Okay, so our counter is moving and today is October 4, 2018. I’m Tacey Ann Rosolowski and today, I am in the Historical Resources Center Reading Room, with Dr. Leslie Schover, and this is our second session together. The time is just about one o’clock, and I wanted to thank you for coming in.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Thanks for including me in the oral history.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah, well it’s my pleasure. Dr. Meistrich had kind of touched on some of these issues, but he was saying wow, you need to interview Leslie Schover, and so I’m delighted to have the opportunity.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

So, we were strategizing a little bit beforehand and you had said that you wanted to make sure we talked a bit about the multidisciplinary conference on parenthood that happened first in 2004. So if you could tell me a little bit about where the idea came from and who was involved, and what that all entailed.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Well, I’m not sure if I remember exactly where the idea came from, and I may have talked about this a little in session one, but Dr. Meistrich and I, together, wrote an R13 conference grant, and the idea was to do a very multidisciplinary conference on all the issues involved with parenthood after cancer. From what we knew about molecular damage to eggs and sperm, from environmental causes and chemotherapy and radiation, to genetic issues related to cancer and offspring, to ethnical issues about helping cancer survivors have children, and all the technical issues involved with fertility preservation, which was just really getting a good start at that point. I think we also talked about --we definitely had people talking about adoption and sperm and egg donation, as a way to become parents after cancer. What I often remember is that when we were writing the proposal, some people were kind of dubious and they said, Well, you know, you’ve got all these—[ ] You’ve got all these basic scientists and then you’ve got psychologists and bioethics people, and they aren’t going to want to listen to each other, they won’t be interested in each others’ talks. But actually, it was just a very successful conference, and in fact, there were two embargoed papers at the conference. One was Kutluk Oktay had one of the first papers that he did on taking cryopreserved ovarian tissue and implanting it in a patient and trying to retrieve mature eggs.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

What’s an embargoed paper, I’ve never heard that before.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

It’s a paper that the journal thinks is so important, that they don’t want any press coverage of it until they release it, when it’s either published online or in paper form. I think that was long enough ago, that there was probably still paper form. I can’t remember now, what the other embargoed paper was. Oh, I know, there is a researcher who has promoted the idea that women aren’t born with all the oocytes they will ever have, but that maybe oocytes can be produced in adulthood, in the bone marrow. John Tilley, who was at Harvard at the time, T-i-l-l-e-y. That theory has not completely gone down the drain, but it remains very controversial and most people don’t believe it. That was the other paper. So you know, the conference got a lot of attention and I think it really played a role in furthering the whole oncofertility field, and getting people collaborating on research. We actually got funding from what was then the—it’s the Livestrong Foundation now, and then it was—well I guess it was… I’m trying to remember what the original name for Livestrong was [The Lance Armstrong Foundation]. They changed it a little bit after the major disgrace issue. They gave us funding to publish the proceedings in a monograph of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, so that was published in 2005. We also had a follow-up conference the next year, of kind of working groups, to talk further about some of the principle issues that we had brought up in the first conference.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Now that question of cross-disciplinary conversation is so ongoing. What do you think made it possible for there to be that dialogue across those boundaries?

Leslie Schover, PhD:

Well, maybe the unifying factor is you know, everybody really wanting to promote reproduction after cancer, and wanting cancer patients to have the opportunity to become biological parents if they want to, after cancer. I think that may have given people a common interest, even if they were doing very disparate things.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

And I’m thinking, sometimes that common purpose can really help people open their minds to kind of go through the practicalities of how do we actually talk to one another when our jargons are different, our assumptions are different. I mean, I’m just curious, did you kind of see any of those strategies taking place or did you experience that when you were working with people who were from different fields?

Leslie Schover, PhD:

That’s a good question but I don’t remember a lot of specific examples. I remember feeling like I was learning a lot, but I’ve always been very interested in trying to understand it, even if it’s through a glass darkly, some of the more molecular parts of things, or understanding the medical procedures that patients go through. It was also a fairly small conference. I think there were maybe 150 people there and I think that also gives a chance for more dialogue between people, than if you’ve got a 500-person conference.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Absolutely. This is a conversation, this kind of conversation I’ve had with a number of people, because so many people are involved in translational research or in multidisciplinary research, and they talk about what does it mean to sit down with somebody who is from a very different field, and it’s a process. It’s a process of figuring out how to even talk about some of these issues. Not that you aren’t fully committed to the end game of serving the patient, but how do you just, in the moment, communicate across different sorts of disciplinary assumptions and frames of reference, I mean all of that kind of stuff. So it’s a very interesting communication question.

Leslie Schover, PhD:

I think also, one of the things we did, as I recall, is every paper was given to the whole group, rather than having a lot of breakouts. [ ] You know, I think that that also—I mean, people aren’t forced to listen, but they’re more likely to listen if they’re listening to the whole range of papers, rather than being grouped with their own colleagues that they know well. It was also a very international conference. We had a lot of people from Europe and I think maybe a couple from Asia.

T.A. Rosolowski, PhD:

Yeah. So, interesting. People prepared to listen, and with the structure of the conference, are given a sort of different opportunity to open their heads a bit. That’s very, very cool.

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Chapter 08: A Landmark Conference on Cancer Survivorship and Parenthood

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