Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection: Multidisciplinary Approaches and Care

Interview with Ellen Gritz, PhD
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Developing a new department of behavioral science

"When Dr. Mickey LeMaistre, who was the President of MD Anderson at that time, and  Dr. Bernard Levin, hired me, they asked me to draft a vision statement.  And my vision statement was based on my belief that I had one shot at making Behavioral Science flourish in a comprehensive cancer center, so I was going to include the full spectrum from primary prevention, tobacco, and other risk factors like diet, exercise, sun exposure, etc., through screening and early detection, into cancer-patient behavior, quality of life, and survivorship, and not all of those were popular terms then...

So I drafted a vision statement that did that, that encompassed all of that, and initially people said, “Well, survivorship isn’t part of prevention.”

And I said, “Yes, it’s tertiary prevention. Just look at a public health textbook and you’ll see it’s the prevention of further sequelae.” There’s primary prevention, the prevention of disease in the first place, secondary prevention, which is early detection and diagnosis, and then survivorship, which is everything that comes later after diagnosis and treatment and person living out their life until they die. So it was a bit of a battle, but I won, and so I had the imprimatur, in essence, to recruit faculty along in all of those areas." 

Interview with Raymond Sawaya, MD
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A vision of a comprehensive neuro-service

"This was the vision that I believe I brought to this program—it was not only to have the best neurosurgical service, but it had to be comprehensive. In other words, we could not say, “Well, we are very good at these types of brain tumors, but those other types of brain tumors, well, we don’t have the expertise or we don’t handle them as well.” So the idea was to be a comprehensive neurosurgical oncology program. It had to cover the entire gamut—the entire aspect that would make it a serious program...

And this includes the ability for the surgeons to do high-level surgery. That means technology. It includes infrastructure, such as a tissue bank for research, such as a database to collect the information prospectively, and therefore eventually be able to analyze and understand, what’s the impact of the work we’re doing? It includes education and training, because there were very, very few neurosurgeons trained in the modern ways of treating brain tumor patients. And so I established the first clinical neurosurgical oncology program…"

Interview with Stephen Tomasovic, PhD
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Fostering multidisciplinary research

" [Dr.] Clark set organizational structures where people were expected to work together, and they learned to do that.  They learned more about each other’s disciplines.  They all really were desperately wanting to make progress against cancer.  And when you began to learn more about radiation therapy or medical oncology and you realized your surgery couldn’t do it, and your patient was going to die, what could -- you start looking around.  And if people are there, they’re working with you, or you’re hearing about what they’re doing, having this all together in an organizational structure that fostered that climate and that culture began to have its effect.  And that has continued to this day.  And the clinics are all integrated."