Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize winner for The Emperor of All Maladies, speaks at Mission Possible campaign celebration

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Donors gathered at twilight in Dana-Farber's Yawkey Center for Cancer Care on Apr. 27 to be recognized for their exceptional generosity to Mission Possible: The Dana-Farber Campaign to Conquer Cancer.

When the campaign ended September 30, 2010, Dana-Farber became the first hospital in New England to set, reach, and exceed a $1 billion capital campaign goal (the campaign raised $1.18 billion).

Campaign contributions from more than one million donors over seven years have generated novel insights into underlying mechanisms of cancer, providing the knowledge and tools to provide care that, ultimately, will be personalized to each patient's tumor.

Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, PhD, was the featured speaker for the celebration and eloquently detailed the special partnership among patients, doctors, researchers, and philanthropy in his book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

The campaign parallels the period of time Mukherjee, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and oncologist at Columbia University Medical Center, was writing the book, which he began as a fellow at Dana-Farber in 2003.

"A patient asked me, 'What is it that I am battling?" he recalled. "The book is my attempt to answer her question."

The Emperor of All Maladies was included among the "10 best books of 2010" by the New York Times and recently won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

In his remarks, Mukherjee said, "Every life will be touched by the family of diseases we call cancer."

He then gave a brief summary of cancer's "biography," beginning with Egyptian hieroglyphs that reference a woman with a disease we now know to be breast cancer.

The book features several Dana-Farber physicians, scientists, and patients who have starred in the story of cancer research and care, most notably Dana-Farber's founder, Sidney Farber, MD (who appears on page one); philanthropist Mary Lasker, the "fairy godmother" of cancer research; and the little boy for whom the Jimmy Fund was named in 1948, Einar Gustafson.

"To Farber's evangelistic tambourine, Lasker added her own drumbeats of enthusiasm," writes Mukherjee.

Most important, he said, are the patients who stand at the forefront of cancer history.

He dedicated the book to Robert Sandler (1945-1948), a little boy from Dorchester, Mass., who achieved a temporary remission with Farber's antifolate treatment, which prevented the proliferation of cancer cells in his blood.

The celebration included remarks by Dana-Farber President Edward J. Benz Jr., MD, who was introduced by Campaign Co-chairs Larry Lucchino, a Dana-Farber trustee and president of the Boston Red Sox, and Josh Bekenstein, now chairman of the Dana-Farber board of trustees.

President Benz cited the many Dana-Farber achievements made possible by donor generosity, such as developing and applying new technologies that are helping to transform cancer research and care; establishing nine new Integrative Research Centers that facilitate authentic collaborations critical to our progress; accelerating the development of effective new cancer drugs and other therapeutics; and opening of our first new clinical building in more than 30 years.

Still, he said, the celebration was not the most important one in the Yawkey Center that day.

"Some of our patients received news that their outcome would be good, and we have to be sure that these celebrations continue."

Story by Christine Cleary 


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