O'Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center Magazine Spring 2020 | Page 11

GREAT EXPECTATIONS:
SLECKMAN BRINGS
NEW PERSPECTIVE TO
O’NEAL CANCER CENTER
By Anna Waters
Golf club repair isn’t much
like DNA strand repair,
but when young New
Jersey state trooper Barry
Sleckman gave up his shop
for medical school, he never
thought he would be trading
it in for a lab.
Now the director of the
O’Neal Comprehensive
Cancer Center at UAB,
Barry P. Sleckman, M.D.,
Ph.D., has built his storied
career on the pursuit of
what he calls “great things.”
Emergency medical training was 18-year-old New
Jersey state trooper Barry Sleckman’s favorite part
of his job.
As a teenager in Summit, New Jersey, Sleckman never
imagined himself as an academic. He spent the better
part of his four years in high school running his own
small business, making and repairing golf clubs out of
his basement, which he had been doing since he was
only 12 years old.
Sleckman kept the basement repair shop while he briefly
attended Farleigh Dickinson University – at least until
he somehow took and passed the civil-service exam
required for acceptance into the New Jersey State Police
Academy. He only took the exam to support a friend
with dreams of becoming a state trooper, but Sleckman
joined the academy himself, leaving college behind.
Yet, as he watched the paramedics and emergency
medical technicians as a young trooper-in-training,
Sleckman realized he had just serendipitously stumbled
upon his own dream.
“I thought, ‘OK, I want to be a doctor,’” he decided.
Now, as the new director of the O’Neal Comprehensive
Cancer Center at UAB and an expert in the science of
DNA repair, Barry P. Sleckman, M.D., Ph.D., says that
doing “great things” – as his mentor, immunologist
Emil R. Unanue, M.D., often described it – is the key to
finding meaningful success in any field.
UAB.EDU/CANCER
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