Pulling Back the Curtain
Gary Gilliland, MD, PhD
In this edition, Gary Gilliland, MD, PhD, talks about the detours in his path to
academic medicine, the patient that inspired him to pursue hematology, and the
exciting ways the field has evolved since he began his career. Dr. Gilliland is president
and director of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington.
What did you want to be
when you grew up?
I decided in grade school that I
wanted to be a doctor, and I never
shook that idea. I’m not sure exactly
where the idea originated, but I sup-
pose it was a combination of what I
saw each of my parents doing.
My dad worked as an engineer
for General Electric, where he
operated test nuclear reactors that
generated isotopes for medical
purposes. The work he did was
great, but I gravitated more toward
science than math.
My mom was a stay-at-home
mother and she often did volunteer
work visiting people who were sick,
at the hospital or their homes. I
would occasionally accompany her
on these visits, and it gave me some
early exposure to the value of help-
ing people. After that, the eventual
goal became medical training so
that I could help people more fully.
We grew up with one general
family rule: We should be out in the
world trying to do good for other
people. One of my brothers is a
private-practice anesthesiologist,
another is a surgeon who is Chief
Health Officer for Blue Cross San
Francisco, and the youngest was the
president/CEO of the travel tech-
nology company Sabre, which is the
parent company for Travelocity.
Who were the mentors that
helped shape your career
path to medicine?
The two most important mentors
in my career were John Collier,
PhD, and H. Franklin Bunn, MD.
Dr. Collier was my profes-
sor and laboratory mentor in
microbiology while I was a gradu-
ate student at the University of
California, Los Angeles. He had
a profound influence on the way
I think about conducting science
and the value of crisp, clean ex-
periments that can produce robust
results. I went to graduate school
before I went to medical school,
and that proved to be a wonder-
ful decision because it helped me
approach clinical translational
research from a rigorous, scientific
perspective.
I moved to Brigham and
Women’s Hospital for my intern-
ship – my first real job – in my
early 30s, when I met Dr. Bunn.
He studied hemoglobinopathies
like sickle cell disease primarily,
but he also was interested in bone
marrow failure syndromes like my-
elodysplastic syndromes. Like Dr.
Collier, Dr. Bunn was a rigorous
scientist (specifically, a protein
biochemist), which is one of the
things that made me want to work
with him. He generously let me
work in hematologic malignancies
– a relatively new area for his lab.
What lessons did you learn
from working with them?
Do good science and get good
answers. However, not every-
thing in science will work as you
expect, so perseverance is key.
Don’t do things because they’re
easy to do; do things because
they’re important.
Gary Gilliland, MD, PhD, on a camping trip to Denali National Park in Alaska.
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ASH Clinical News
When did you decide to
focus on hematology?
Undoubtedly, Dr. Bunn inspired
me to pursue hematology, and one
patient I cared for early on truly
compelled me to work in hema-
tologic malignancies. When I first
met the young woman, she pre-
sented with acute leukemia. Her
disease was treated into remission.
It relapsed, and then we treated it
again with more intensive chemo-
therapy. The good news was that
her leukemia didn’t come back,
January 2018