Dr. Judah Folkman is the Boston-based researcher who’s become many people’s odds-on favorite in the race to cure cancer. He owes part of his fame to a 1998 front-page New York Times article that hyped his research and swamped his lab with calls from desperate patients.
But the real story of Folkman’s determination may some day one-up the media frenzy. When he was only 28 years old, he fixed on the then-radical notion that cancerous tumors generate and feed on their own networks of blood vessels; and he’s spent the 40 years since working through the implications of that idea.
Folkman’s obsession embroiled him early on in big-league hospital politics and cost him the respect of colleagues who derided his ideas and criticized his experiments. But he can now cure cancer in mice, and he’s still at work on the trickier fix for humans.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Robert Cooke, science writer for Newsday and author of “Dr. Folkman’s War: Angiogenesis and the Struggle to Defeat Cancer”
and Michael O’Reilly, Assistant Professor, Radiation Oncology and Cancer Biology at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston who discovered several anti-angiogenesis substances with Dr. Folkman