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.
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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