ASH Clinical News September 2015 | Page 16

Pulling Back the Curtain Jerald Radich, MD We can learn much more from the innovators and mentors in hematology and oncology than just clinical expertise. In “Pulling Back the Curtain,” we speak with hematology/oncology professionals about how they approach their leadership positions and what advice they would give those just getting started in the field. Jerald Radich, MD, from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, spoke with ASH Clinical News about luck, family, and running a lab. was “Squirrel” as in Rocky and Bullwinkle). I was a bit of a nerd – and still am – but my saving grace was that I was a good athlete, so they couldn’t give me too hard of a time. Jerald Radich, MD, with his family. 14 ASH Clinical News What was your first job? My first real job was at a Safeway grocery store; I started in high school, and basically worked there throughout college. One of the obstacles of going to away to college was needing to find a way to pay for it myself. In those days, you actually could pay for school and room and board with the amount of money you made over a summer vacation; this is impossible now. There were good and bad aspects of that grocery store job. It could be mind-numbing work, but it also made me realize that I wanted to actually go into something creative. The other good side of being bored is that you have to find fun and inventive ways to keep your wits about you. For instance, occasionally all the young employees in the store would conspire to send everyone who asked the location of an item to aisle four; within a halfhour, 90 percent of the people in the store were jammed into aisle four. We did other mischievous things to keep ourselves entertained, but I’m afraid if I highlighted them all here, some readers might be reluctant to visit their local grocery store. The other good aspect of the job, obviously, was that I was able to pay my way through the University of California San Diego, so the work had very real value. I lived near the beach for a few years, and then I went to graduate school at Harvard – which was a completely different cultural and climatic experience for a small town, scrawny Californian kid. When I left San Diego for Boston, the warmest thing I owned was a sweatshirt. Luckily, I lived right next to an Army Navy surplus store in Boston, so every day I’d walk out of the apartment, see how cold it was, and walk over to the store to buy warmer clothes. Unfortunately, this clothing style has pretty much prevailed in my wardrobe ever since. What was your childhood like? I grew up in a small town in California. My childhood was filled with sports, books, and near endless sinus infections. I was often sick but it never deterred me too much. I was regularly kidded for weighing all of two pounds and having an extremely high voice (my nickname Do you still play sports? I play pretty much any sport with a ball, and I try to exercise most days. I guess I’m an exercise nut. In the summers, I often try to do the trifecta of biking before work, playing tennis after work, and then fitting in a few holes of golf or another bike ride. It keeps me fit physically, but I’m also the type of person who can’t just sit in one place and relax, so it keeps me sane, too. If I just sit in a beach chair, I’ll start obsessing about work, about what I’m doing wrong or what I’m about to do wrong, so I like to occupy my mind in other ways – like focusing on a tennis ball or not crashing into cars on my bike. We’re also a pretty active family; we take a yearly trip to Bend, Oregon, where we go hiking, biking, trout-fishing, kayaking, and playing tennis and golf – it’s basically all activities from sunrise to sunset. It’s our family’s idea of heaven. Was anyone in your family in medicine? No. My dad comes from an immigrant family from Croatia, and my mom migrated from Oklahoma to California à la The Grapes of Wrath, living in tents and worse. There was no one at all in the sciences or academia, or any advanced education, but they encouraged me to keep going to school. My dad was convinced that I should be an orthodontist because, after paying for braces for my sister and me, he was sure that orthodontics was the best racket in the world. The prospect of dealing with people’s mouths all of the time just held no appeal for me, not to mention that people would dread hav- ing to see me. Of course, now I’m a bone marrow transplanter, so it’s not like I’m the Good Humor Man. When did you decide to go into medicine? Were you always interested in it? Like many undergradua tes, I had a variety of things I thought I wanted to do. I started college as a philosophy and physics major, and somewhere along the line I decided that I was going to be a writer. I got into graduate courses in creative writing, with Toni Morrison and Ursula LeGuin as guest professors. At the time, Morrison was an editor at Random House. She would read our writing and once said, “Eighty percent of the books we publish are solicited,” which was code for “Don’t give up your day jobs.” After that, I realized I should probably look into something else. In my last year of school, I started working at a free clinic because I was interested in helping people, liked the political vibe, and found I really enjoyed the clinical work with patients. This was in the mid-1970s, so I received all of the training needed to perform histories, physicals, and draw cultures in a couple of weeks – things that you would need four years and a license to do today. During graduate school, I studied epidemiology because I was interested in mapping diseases. I took many courses with the medical students in that program, and my interest in helping people continued to grow. I decided at that point to pursue a career in academic medicine. Were there any particular mentors who helped shape your career? The person that actually got me really interested in science and academics was Jack Bradbury, PhD, an evolutionary biologist. He changed my way of thinking about, virtually, all of life – everything from behavior to genetics to September 2015