Dateline DFCI
Q & A on DFCI's present and future with President Edward J. Benz Jr., M.D.
Edward J. Benz Jr., M.D., president of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
His high school biology teacher in Allentown, Pennsylvania, probably never imagined that debating the properties of DNA with her young student, Ed Benz Jr., would be the catalyst that launched his distinguished career in medical research.
In an attempt to convince her that his argument was sound, Benz, now 55, read a Scientific American book on DNA, then a relatively new discovery, and can still recall his sense of wonder. "The beauty of DNA," he says,"was that if you could understand what the genes were and how they worked, it explained so much about the zillions of biological phenomena, species, and diseases out there. It seemed a way to bring order to chaos."
He went on to study biology at Princeton University and graduate magna cum laude from Harvard Medical School in 1973. Now an internationally recognized hematologist, he chaired the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for five years and held the prestigious Sir William Osler Professorship.
Arriving in November to become Dana-Farber's sixth president, Benz has been pleased to find what he describes as DFCI's "array of talent, sense of commitment, and resources unlike any other institution in academic medicine."
Also holding leadership positions with Dana-Farber/Partners CancerCare, the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, and the Dana-Farber Children's Hospital Cancer Center, Benz expresses excitement at taking the Institute's helm at a time of unprecedented opportunity for making progress against cancer. Last month, in a conversation with Paths of Progress Editor Paul Hennessy and writer Debra Ruder, he reflected on his first months here, the challenges ahead, and the most promising advances in cancer care and research.
Q. What are your priorities for Dana-Farber, and how will you measure their accomplishment?
A. I've set our goal for the next decade under the theme of "putting the science to work." Dana-Farber has had tremendous success in attracting many of the best basic scientists in cancer biology, in developing world-class clinical care programs, and in doing clinical trials with established agents for treating cancer. We have to continue those efforts, but we really need to develop programs that put the new science to work in patients.
Our number one priority — often referred to as translational research — is to use our science to generate better diagnostic and treatment agents, and better ways of tracking and characterizing the cancers that occur in patients so we can tailor therapy more appropriately.
We've had spectacular success in childhood cancers, good success in adult blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma, and isolated successes in some areas of solid tumors like testicular cancers. But for most others, with a few notable exceptions, all that's been done hasn't had the impact on cure rates or remission rates that we'd like to see.
We'll measure our progress at the end of a decade by whether or not we've really been able to make an impact on a major common form of cancer: lung, breast, colon, or ovarian cancers — the major public health problems and the big killers of adults in our society.
Realistically, it's unlikely that we'll wipe out all the most prevalent cancers, but if our approach is working, I think we'll begin to see at least some of their rates falling. We are also an Institute that studies AIDS, and the same goals apply: We need to bring the discoveries of our scientists to patients with AIDS.
