Amherst at the Forefront of Access to Care and the Treatment of Cancer
Alumni representing a microcosm of specialties in the medical field gathered Jan. 20 to share their experiences with students, discuss the latest treatments and technologies, and catch up with classmates.
The ninth annual Gerald R. Fink ’62 Bioscience Symposium, “Amherst at the Forefront of Access to Care and the Treatment of Cancer,” featured a keynote address by Dr. Douglas Lowy ’64, acting director of the National Cancer Institute. This year’s symposium was dedicated to the memory of Dr. Rice Cowan Leach ’62, who died in April 2016.
“It’s very fulfilling that so many of the alumni of the College return here every year, some of them more than 50 years out,” said George W. Carmany ’62, health care investor, former chairman of Tufts Medical Center and member of the Advisory Committee on Education at Harvard Medical School.
Established in 2009 in honor of Gerald R. Fink ’62, the symposium enables students who aspire to careers in health care policy, medicine and bioscience research to interact with alumni who are leaders in these fields. Carmany noted that about 1,000 people have attended the symposium over the years
This year’s speakers covered such topics as cancer immunotherapy, the Ebola and Zika viruses, and Leach’s work as an advocate for the disenfranchised in such places as Guatemala and Native American reservations. In discussing disease prevention, David M. Lawrence ’62, former chairman and CEO of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Kaiser Foundation hospitals, invoked highway traffic and accidents as a metaphor: the response to traffic jams and accidents isn’t to build more body shops; it’s to look at traffic flow.
Isaiah L. Holloway Jr. ’17, an intern at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, gave a presentation on a new genome editing tool.
In his keynote, Lowy discussed “precision medicine,” which uses knowledge of the workings of disease on the molecular level to treat (in this case) cancer. He argued that this approach can also be important in the prevention of disease.
“Where the individual characteristics of the patient are sufficiently distinct, interventions can be concentrated on those who will benefit, sparing expense and side effects for those who will not,” he said.
Lowy is best known for developing the technology that underlies the three FDA-approved human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines.
Asked how graduating students can succeed in medicine, he noted that Amherst students are up to the task.
“Find a niche, what you are good at, what you like doing,” he said.