A Decade of Leadership

(From left) Faculty member Thomas Kelly, Chairman of the Boards of Overseers and Managers Douglas Warner, Harold Varmus, and Robert Wittes.

--Thomas J. Kelly, Director, Sloan-Kettering Institute

More recently, in the fall of 2009, Memorial Sloan-Kettering opened a new 16-story Breast and Imaging Center housing the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Imaging Center; and, in the spring of 2010, the Center for Image-Guided Intervention, a new Surgical Day Hospital, and a new endoscopy suite opened on the second floor of Memorial Hospital (see full story).

"I don't think of my time at Memorial Sloan-Kettering as being about bricks and mortar, but in order to expand old programs and build new ones -- and bring in new people -- you have to build new facilities."

-- Harold Varmus

Another significant collaborative research initiative created under his leadership was the Starr Cancer Consortium, an ambitious $100 million undertaking designed to coordinate cancer research efforts at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, The Rockefeller University, and Weill Cornell Medical College, along with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

"Nearly all great ideas come from individual minds . . . But validation and acceptance of new information requires communication, convening, and consensus building -- activities that involve a community. Science is an inherently paradoxical activity."

--Harold Varmus, The Art and Politics of Science

"It's not just the sharing of resources, it's the ambience of having a bigger community that works well together. The connections that extend outside Memorial Sloan-Kettering have allowed us to maintain our independent institution with its unique qualities, while gaining access to new technologies and encouraging the personal interactions that influence everyone's research in favorable ways."

-- Harold Varmus

"What Harold accomplished at Memorial Sloan-Kettering over the last ten years is absolutely extraordinary. He grew and focused our research, recruited outstanding people throughout the organization, developed programs and processes to stimulate translational initiatives, began our graduate school, expanded facilities, and raised over $2 billion in new capital. He leaves Memorial Sloan-Kettering better and stronger than he found it -- and it was strong when he got here -- and for that the entire Memorial Sloan-Kettering community is grateful."

-- Douglas A. Warner III, Chairman, Boards of Overseers and Managers

Seeking to bridge basic research and real-life clinical challenges, GSK offers its students an intensive PhD program to study the biological sciences through the lens of cancer. The faculty includes many SKI investigators and Memorial Hospital physician-scientists, with the clinical faculty taking students directly into the clinic. "We expose them not just to research about cancer," Dr. Varmus explains, "but to the clinical experience of cancer. Most basic scientists who didn't go to medical school don't have a clue about what it's like to take care of a patient."

"There was a demand from young prospective scientists for a graduate training program that allowed them to become knowledgeable about disease without necessarily becoming doctors. I thought we had something special to offer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering."

-- Harold Varmus

Clearly, prodigious work remains to be done in the quest to control and some day cure cancer -- and Dr. Varmus' role in this undertaking is far from over. On July 12, 2010, when he assumed the directorship of the National Cancer Institute, he began a challenging new chapter in his personal and scientific journey. "There are tremendous new opportunities in cancer research," he said in an interview with the New York Times on the day his appointment was announced by the White House. "Everyone feels a sense of accelerating success. There are amazing prospects."

"Science is inevitably an incomplete process, and our knowledge of nearly all aspects of the natural world remains very far from complete."

-- Harold Varmus, The Art and Politics of Science

"Harold's immense impact on Memorial Sloan-Kettering has affected all the institution's programs. Over the past decade we have seen major expansion and modernization of the physical plant for clinical and research activities. Many parts of the hospital -- pediatrics, pathology, the operating rooms, the intensive care unit -- have been replaced by state-of-the-art facilities. Other facilities and programs -- the Breast and Imaging Center, the Center for Image-Guided Interventions, and the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program -- have very recently come into being and are spectacular institutional assets.

Early on in his tenure, he redesigned the configuration of our research programs and reoriented several, so that they might more effectively bridge the gap between laboratory and clinic. As a result, this gap is much narrower now than before his arrival, and, although there is much yet to be done, Memorial Sloan-Kettering is well on its way to having the kind of translational research effort that befits one of the world's premier cancer centers. The creation of the Gerstner Sloan-Kettering Graduate School, with its unique emphasis on exposing graduate students to the realities of clinical oncology, is likely to produce a generation of new PhDs with a strong interest in the study of human cancer. And finally Harold has been an indispensible force in our successful recruitment of numerous outstanding research leaders to the Center. It's been quite a decade!"

-- Robert E. Wittes, Physician-in-Chief, Memorial Hospital