Judah Folkman Interview (page: 3 / 6) Cancer Research	Print Interview

What books influenced you as a young person?

Judah Folkman: There were always books in the house. Dad had something like 4,000 books. There were books everywhere, by his bed, by our bed. Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis was a very important book to me. It was about a physician who saw the disease process, and saw that it could be improved, and actually took on the task himself, of trying to make improvement. And the book by Paul DeKruif, The Microbe Hunters, which I read in junior high, about physicians trying to improve things, 'cause at that time, like today, in certain areas, medicine is really primitive.

Medicine seems very advanced now, but not if you have a brain tumor. It's as primitive as it was then. And not if you have leukemia and other kinds of disease. So those books were very influential.

You were very focused. Did you have other activities or hobbies?

Judah Folkman: Well, yes. I worked as a caddie on a golf course, and was in a chess club, and a lot of things. I didn't have sports as a hobby, as most do. To me, the science seemed to be a hobby. There was a Science Club. There were six of us, and we made radios, and did experiments, and we all entered the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. We never got anywhere but we tried it. There was an experiment that I did with another friend, Dick Wolfe. His father owned the Columbus Dispatch, newspaper. He was well-off and he could pay for experiments.

We found that when you bought a goldfish they never stop growing, which was fascinating. The goldfish person told us they always grow. So we had it in an aquarium at school, and we had built a measuring device on the side, so when the fish went by we could get a reading of his length, and every day we plotted it, and every day it grew, and it was on the wall. And the other students would come by just fascinated. It looked like the stock market, it was always going up.

And we changed the water on a regular basis and added the food in excess. Then we added two more fish, and they had plenty of food, but they all dropped down to a slower growth curve. And then we added four, and when we had nine fish, I think it was, they stopped growing. Yet we were changing water as fast as we could, and adding new food, so it was not lack of food. So it became clear that they were talking to each other about crowding. We'd take five fish out and the others would start to grow. It took all the school year, but it was quite interesting.

That's the one we sent in for the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. We had just gotten to the point of saying maybe if we take the water and put it through a cellophane bag in a dialysis, and see if we can find whatever this thing is, is big or small, we hadn't finished that, and I think that's why we didn't even get an honorable mention. But it was an exciting experiment.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. In high school, I began to work just briefly, in the hospital, first in the clinical labs, but then as an orderly in the operating room, to see if I wanted to be a surgeon. And so while I was doing that in about junior year in high school, the Chief of Surgery at Columbus, the University Hospital, Robert Zollinger, a very famous surgeon, stopped me, and he knew the family, and he knew me. He said, "You're wasting your time doing this. If you want to be a surgeon, why don't you go to school at Ohio State and come and work in my surgical laboratory where they're training surgical residents on operations on dogs." That's a standard, that was the standard. "And you can work in the afternoon and help them." And his idea was that he'd always been looking for somebody who knew that they want to be a surgeon, very early. He felt that surgeons should, like violinists and pianists and dancers, start early, instead of waiting till 25 years old. And he said you can learn the anatomy later; do the skills.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

So I went to Ohio State, and for three years, every afternoon, about one o'clock, I would go from classes to his laboratory and operate as a first assistant for his resident surgeons. After a while, I got good enough that they would call up and say, "I'm late, get started." We would do a gastrectomy, or whatever operation they were working on. And then they'd call up and say, "I can't get there, finish up. Do the whole operation." And I was able to do that. So that was a terrific beginning.

How old were you?

Judah Folkman: I was a junior in high school. I started as a orderly in junior high school, but then all the way through college, for three years at Ohio State University, I was in the dog lab in the afternoons.

They would come and go, but I was always there as the assistant. I was helping the surgeons, and I worked very hard at trying to learn how to tie the knots fast and do all that. There was a point at which one of them said, "You have good hands." That's the way they say it. I remember that, because you never know if you can do anything. Then you get a single compliment that can last for years, because you get self-confidence that maybe you can actually do this. I've learned to do that with young surgeons that I'm teaching, or young scientists who are in our laboratory. Their self-confidence is pretty shaky, but you can build it up so that they keep going.

What kinds of frustrations and setbacks have you suffered in your career? How do you deal with them?

Judah Folkman: Many setbacks. Most of the most difficult ones have been in the experiments that I've been doing for the past 30 years, because there it's very clear. And always the problem is knowing when you should give up or not. That's the big problem, I always found, is how long should you persist?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. There's a fine line between persistence and obstinacy, and you never know when you've crossed it. So mostly, as I observed other scientists and read about them, many of them had given up. Fleming gave up on penicillin. He discovered it in the late '20s, tried to purify it, failed, and wrote in 1932, "I give up." He said, "This will never be useful because it's too unstable." And so it waited until 1941 till Florey and Chaine could figure out how to purify it. All three got the Nobel prize. So had he persisted, he might have had it many years earlier. There are many, many, many examples in science.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The obstacles mainly were in the very beginning, in the late '60s, when we proposed the idea that tumors need to recruit their own private blood supply. That was met with almost universal hostility and ridicule and disbelief by other scientists. Because the dogma at that time was that tumors did not need to stimulate new blood vessels, they just grew on old ones. And that even if they could, after we showed it, the next disbelief was it didn't make any difference; it was a side effect like pus in a wound. So if you said you were studying wound healing and you found pus, they said you were studying a side effect, it's not important. And then after we showed it was important, which took us about five years (and we said there would be specific signals, molecules that would stimulate this, everyone said -- pathologists, surgeons, basic scientists -- said, "No, that's non-specific inflammation. You're studying dirt." They used to say, "You're studying dirt. There will be no such molecules." And then when we actually proved that there was -- that was now 1983 (starting in the late '60s), we had the first molecule. They said, "Well, but you'll never prove that that's what tumors use." So it was each step.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

Now it's not only well accepted that tumors are using specific molecules, they're actually made now, manufactured. When we said, "You should be able to turn off this process," everybody said, "It's impossible. Once angiogenesis is turned on, once they recruit their blood supply..." In other words, now they were using our own theories against us. They said, "Once they recruit their own blood supply." That's all accepted now. Every article now, a thousand articles a year, start out with, "It is well accepted that tumors are angiogenesis dependent."

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