Duke Nobel Laureate in WaPo on Curing Cancer

A column in today's Washington Post by William G. Kaelin, MD, a 2019 Nobel laureate with Duke BS and MD degrees.

Main thesis:

Quote:

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Treating early-stage science like engineering [such as the race to the moon], however, is shortsighted and counterproductive. Early-stage science is often dominated by creative individuals who are allowed to follow their curiosity and to go where their scientific discoveries take them. Prematurely forcing scientists into teams with predetermined deliverables risks creating a herd mentality and tunnel vision. Better to have 10 scientists going in different directions in hopes that one of them actually discovers something.

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Bio from Wiki: Kaelin was born in New York City on November 23, 1957. Kaelin earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics and chemistry at Duke University, and remained for his MD, graduating in 1982. He did his residency in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins University and his fellowship in oncology at Dana–Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI). After deciding as an undergraduate that research was not a strength of his, at DFCI he did research in the lab of David Livingston, where he found success in the study of retinoblastoma. In 1992, he set up his own lab at DFCI down the hall from Livingston's where he investigated hereditary forms of cancer such as von Hippel–Lindau disease. He became a professor at Harvard Medical School in 2002.