Chapter: 11 Early Experiences at MD Anderson

Chapter: 11 Early Experiences at MD Anderson

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Description

Dr. Bodey begins the segment by noting the importance of the work done by Dr. Emil Frei and Dr. J Freireich at MD Anderson. He then observes that, prior to his own arrival at MD Anderson, no one had done large-scale studies of infectious diseases. Dr. Bodey tells two anecdotes about attending conferences.

Identifier

BodeyGP_03_20130723_C11

Publication Date

7-23-2013

City

Houston, Texas

Topics Covered

The Interview Subject's Story - The ResearcherThe Researcher MD Anderson History Building/Transforming the Institution Multi-disciplinary Approaches Growth and/or Change MD Anderson Impact Discovery and Success

Transcript

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

All right, we’re ready. Let me just start it. Okay. So we’re recording, and this is Tacey Ann Rosolowski. Today is July 23, 2013, and the time is about 1:12. I am in the home of Dr. Gerald Bodey up in The Woodlands, north of Houston, and this is our third interview session together. Thank you, Dr. Bodey, for going through your records and selecting some things that you felt would be good to add to the oral history.

Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:

It’s my pleasure. I hope what I have to say is of some value.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

So please, yes, just go through what you discovered.

Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:

Well, Dr. Frei and Dr. Freireich came down here to MD Anderson, and they played a very important part in establishing chemotherapy studies and so on at MD Anderson—not that there weren’t any being done before, but it was done on a much larger scale and better organized and so on.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Is that really what was unique about what they did—the scale and the organization?

Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:

Well, and also the contributions of some studies themselves—the drug combinations and so on. But it was all focused on cancer chemotherapy. Now, there was one other element, which I think I played a major role in, and that was in the studies of infections in cancer patients. Not that there weren’t other people who had dome some of that before I came, but I had a major interest in this that I had developed when I was at the National Cancer Institute.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Could you just for a second—could you tell me what people had already done and then how you pushed things forward?

Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:

I don’t know that there was much in the way of organized studies of infections in cancer patients before I came. There were people who were doing—who had access to some experimental agents, but they weren’t doing studies on a larger scale, as we were able to do. My first office at MD Anderson was in a temporary building. At that time they were in the process of building an addition, primarily for laboratories in the back of the original MD Anderson structure. But I was in this temporary building for several years. Then finally I got to move over. Then what happened was that they decided to have a satellite unit at the old Center Pavilion, which was an apartment house diagonally across the street from MD Anderson. Then I was assigned to be the head of the hospital program, which were all patients from our department, so I moved over there. Then I had some nice office space, but I was distanced from MD Anderson. We had about a twenty- or thirty-bed unit at this Center Pavilion.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

And this was just for chemo patients with leukemia?

Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:

This was for chemo and leukemia—well, not just leukemia, but patients receiving chemotherapy. Now, one of the private practice physician groups had already established one floor of the unit before we came. We had nothing to do with them. They were just a separate unit, but they were the first to establish any medical facility there in the Center Pavilion.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

I didn’t realize that there were actually private practice physicians who were part of that.

Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:

They weren’t part of MD Anderson. They did it on their own.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Right, but they shared space.

Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:

They were their own group of physicians. They moved in there from—and I had a small laboratory there as well. I actually—when I got to Center Pavilion, then I had more laboratory space and more people working for me and so on. I might start by talking about a couple of experiences that I had in the early days of my stay here at MD Anderson. There are scientific societies that have a yearly meeting to discuss cancer and one—primarily a laboratory—and AACR and then another, ASCO, which is primarily clinical. Dr. Freireich, of course, encouraged us to make presentations, and he got me to submit an abstract. It was accepted at their meeting in San Francisco. I don’t know what year, but the late 1960s, I guess. And what he had taught us was that if you’re making a very formal presentation like that, you ought to write everything down like, “As you can see on the next slide—” So I did that and wrote everything down. I went to the meeting, and there were several speakers before me. Then they announced that I was the next speaker, and I got up. I may have said a sentence or two, then I asked for my first slide, and nothing happened. I said, “May I please have my first slide?” Still nothing happened. So the third time around the projectionist responded, and he said, “We don’t have any slides for you.” Well, if I hadn’t followed Dr. Freireich’s advice to write everything out, I would have been totally devastated. I was almost that anyway, but I gave my talk, and that was on a Friday. The next Monday—

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

And you never found your slides?

Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:

The next Monday I was at my office, and I got a phone call from the guy who had been there before me, wanting to know if I had his slides. What he had done was when he was done, he walked past the projectionists table, took a batch of slides that he thought were his, and instead he was taking mine. And he didn’t have the courtesy enough to apologize or anything. He had my slides, and all he was concerned about was whether I had his.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

Oh my gosh. Did you ever get your slides back?

Gerald P. Bodey Sr., MD:

Yeah, I got my slides back. But as I say, if I hadn’t done what Dr. Freireich had suggested, I would have been totally devastated, because I had never given a formal talk like that before. I had another interesting experience at the Infectious Disease Society meeting. I was working with, what was then a new antibiotic, carbenicillin, and having pretty good results. But we were having some infections caused by an organism known as Serratia, and carbenicillin wasn’t working very well. They had a speaker from Canada there who made a presentation at the meeting, and he was talking about carbenicillin also. Then he made the statement that one of the organisms that was particularly susceptible to carbenicillin was Serratia. So we had a little sub-group after the meeting was over of experts in the field talking together. He was talking again about how carbenicillin was a real find for treating these difficult infections. So I piped up, and I said, “We’ve been using carbenicillin as well. It is a very good drug, but only about 20% of our Serratia infections have responded to carbenicillin. We don’t find that it’s a useful antibiotic.” So this guy says, “Well, what kind of patients are you treating?” I said, “Well, they’re cancer patients.” He said, “Well, they all die anyway.” So those were the kinds of things that you had to begin to get a pretty thick skin when you’re going around. I was young, and you’re a guy getting dumped on here and there.

Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:

But that’s kind of a telling story though about the attitude and how, in a sense, primitive cancer treatment was at the time. I mean, it was rare at the time for patients to survive.

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Chapter: 11 Early Experiences at MD Anderson

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