March 14, 2002
Judah Folkman, famed cancer surgeon, to speak here April 4
In research, there’s a very fine line between persistence and obstinacy.
–Judah Folkman, from NOVA “Cancer Warrior”
In the early 1960s, surgeon and researcher Dr. Judah Folkman had an idea about how tumors grew. He’d seen tumors on the operating table and he’d seen them growing in petri dishes. Blood supply, Folkman hypothesized, was the key to tumor growth. Without new blood vessels, tumors simply did not thrive.
In 1971, Folkman published his theory of angiogenesis in the New England Journal of Medicine. Angiogenesis, the formation and recruitment of new blood vessels, is necessary for tumor growth. Critics of the theory — and there were a fair number — were silenced over time as Folkman and his colleagues reported the first purified angiogenic molecule, the first angiogenesis inhibitor and proposed the concept of angiogenic disease. The mechanism of angiogenesis is now a worldwide field of investigation.
Angiogenesis was just one of many fortuitous ideas that Folkman has shared with the scientific community. As an undergraduate at Ohio State University, Folkman invented paddles to cool the liver to prevent damage from interruption in blood supply during surgery. While still in medical school, Folkman invented a technique using a polyethylene sheet to close holes in the hearts of babies born with a certain heart defect. Folkman was also the first medical student invited to address the American College of Surgery conference.
During his stint as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, Folkman and colleagues reported the first use of silicone rubber implantable polymers for the sustained release of drugs. This later became the basis for the five-year contraceptive Norplant and initiated the field of controlled release technology.
Folkman will present “Angiogenesis-Dependent Diseases” at the Science in Medicine lecture, noon, Thursday, April 4, in Hogness Auditorium at the Health Sciences Center. Everyone is welcome.
Folkman received an M.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Medical School in 1957. He began surgical training at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was chief resident from 1964 to 1965. He interrupted his surgical training from 1960 to 1962 to serve at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.
Folkman’s academic career includes being a professor of surgery, pediatric surgery, anatomy and cellular biology, and cell biology at Harvard Medical School. His hospital appointments include chairman of surgery and surgeon-in-chief at the Children’s Hospital in Boston.
Among Folkman’s many honors, he was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1992 he received the Christopher Columbus Discovery Award in Biomedical Research from the NIH and the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Congress on Cell and Tissue Culture. He is the author of more than 300 peer-reviewed papers and holds honorary degrees from seven universities.
The NOVA documentary “Cancer Warrior” was first broadcast on February 27, 2001. It is scheduled for rebroadcast March 19, 2002, and is also available online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/cancer/program.html
