O'Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center Magazine Spring 2020 | Page 12

O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center Director Barry Sleckman, M.D., Ph.D. (right), discusses the O’Neal Cancer Center’s Experimental Therapeutics
Program with program co-leader Eddy Yang, M.D., Ph.D. (left), in the hallway of Wallace Tumor Institute.
After only four months on the New Jersey State Police
Force, Sleckman returned to Farleigh Dickinson
University to hit the books and build his resumé so he
could transfer into a pre-med program.
“I basically had to learn all the stuff I didn’t learn in high
school and then convince some college to let me in,”
he said.
Sleckman eventually gave up his repair shop and asked
for advice from a local surgeon he knew from his days as
a paper boy. The surgeon became fascinated with the
story of this now 19-year-old former state police officer
who had decided to go into medicine.
“He was an older guy, and he really liked me because I
was a state trooper,” Sleckman said. “I was unusual.”
In search of a successor for his private practice in
Summit, New Jersey, the surgeon made a deal with
Sleckman: “‘If you just go to medical school and then
into surgery, you can return and take over my practice,’”
Sleckman said the doctor told him. “So that was
my plan.”
Sleckman gained admission to Lafayette College, a
private school in Easton, Pennsylvania, with a strong
pre-med program, but only as a part-time student.
In the beginning, he was allowed to take only one
course. That course was a general chemistry class
taught by Joseph Sherma, Ph.D., who Sleckman says
challenged his perspective on the nature of science
and research.
Sherma, a chemist at Lafayette who later served as
Sleckman’s research mentor, once proposed a research
question for him to answer in the lab. Sleckman, still new
to the applied sciences, followed up by asking Sherma
what he should be looking for to find the solution, to
which Sherma replied, “I don’t know. You’re going to
figure that out.”
Sleckman says he was surprised to learn that his mentor
did not already hold the answer to his own research
question, but the possibility of “knowing the unknown”
excited him.
“I liked figuring things out that no one had figured out
before,” he said.
10 O’NEAL COMPREHENSIVE CANCER CENTER AT UAB