Memoirs of a Cancer Researcher

Jose Russo

• Editorial: WSPC
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9789813271210
• Categoría: Medicine
• Categoría: Oncology

This narrative of a cancer researcher spans a period in which biomedicine research has been so revolutionary. The educational background and socioeconomic circumstances of the author make the story unique, shedding light on many important intellectual achievements. The author also provides an insightful view on how decisions at the upper echelon of scientific institutions affect cancer researchers. The vivid account of scientific discovery and intellectual evolution provides a fine example for the next generation of cancer researchers.

Contents:

• My Childhood (1942–1954)
• Agustin Alvarez National College (1955–1959)
• The Medical School and My Research in Experimental Pathology (1960–1966)
• Irma, the Turning Point
• My Postdoctoral Years in Argentina (1967–1971)
• My Training in the USA (1972–1973)
• The Breast Cancer Virus and the Viral Team (1973–1976)
• The Breast Cancer Research Laboratory (BCRL) (Defining the Aims 1973–1978)
• The Breast Cancer Research Laboratory — Part 1 (Expanding the Wings 1979–1991)
• The Breast Cancer Research Laboratory — Part 2 (Expanding the Wings 1979–1991)
• The Peak of the Mountain (1991–2002)
• Accomplishments, Sickness, and Death
• Rebuilding My Life
• My Legacy

Readership: Students and researchers working in the biomedical field, especially cancer research. General public interested in the life stories of scientists. Cancer Research;Breast Cancer;Cancer Prevention;Vial Particles;Development;Carcinogenesis;Oncogenes;Organ Culture;Tissue Culture;Genomic;Epigenetic;Peronism;Argentina;Mendoza;Medical School;Experimental Pathology;Electron Microscopy;Pathology00

Chapter 1

My Childhood (1942–1954)

1.1.My parents

On March 24, 1942, the midwife who took care of my delivery from my mother, Teresa Pagano, announced to my father, Felipe Russo, that he had a son. The place that I was born was Rivadavia, a small town to the east of the city of Mendoza, which in those days had less than ten thousand inhabitants. I was baptized in the local church, and my godfather was Natalio, the younger brother of my mother. The name Jose was given to me at my mother’s request in honor of my grandfather, who was loved and admired by her for his rectitude and gentleness. Unfortunately, my grandfather Jose Russo passed away when I was two years old, and although he knew me and held me in his arms, I do not remember his face.

My place of birth was a small town, yet it was not lacking in historical importance and character. Before the Spaniards arrived in the sixteenth century, the place was already a thriving farming community due to the ingenuity of the Huarpe Indians, who dug canals across the lands of Mendoza and neighboring states, providing water to the small farms. The original inhabitants had very well-established farming practices and grew potatoes and corn that, with the addition of the horses and cows the Spaniards brought, allowed them to develop a strong agricultural society. In 1853, the first public school opened, and local parents were required to send their children to receive an education; those who did not comply were fined by the government. In 1900, the immigration influx that populated Argentina reached Rivadavia and spurred the development of the local economy, further enhanced by the connection of the town to the main railroad, allowing the products generated there to be transported to the port of Buenos Aires and then on to the rest of the world.

My father was the eleventh of the thirteen children that my grandmother Maria Belfiore brought into this world in Laboulaye, a small town in the province of Cordoba. She was a pious woman involved in the local church, and all her children were basically good Christians but to her dismay, the practicing of Catholicism was not a priority in their lives.

The inhabitants of Laboulaye speak differently than the rest of the province of Cordoba because they do not have the gliding vowels that cause a word to be pronounced with a sluggish intonation similar to that of the American South. Their Castellan, or Spanish, more closely resembles the dialect spoken in Buenos Aires and Santa Fe than the rest of the province of Cordoba. However, they have a particular way of speaking their Castellan that is more clear and musical and without the high pitch that is often noticed in those coming from Buenos Aires. The name Laboulaye came in honor of Edouard Rene de Laboulaye, a French jurist, poet, author, and anti-slavery activist. He was the one who initiated the idea of a gift from the French people to the United States, eventually resulting in presentation of the Statue of Liberty. Laboulaye was a zealous advocate for the abolition of slavery. This remarkable man inspired the founders to give his name to that small town in Argentina.

The Russos, together with other Italian families, arrived at this particular place in Argentina under the auspicious action of the Argentinean government that at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries facilitated immigration to those areas with low population density. I never could find out exactly what kind of incentives my ancestors received from the Argentinean government, but probably the lure was a piece of land at a very low price. Whatever the conditions, my grandfather got fifteen acres of land, and this was the way in which bakeries, butcher shops, tailors, and general stores were built all across Argentina at that time. The “1880s generation,” as they are called, designed the ports, the railroads, and the roads that were opening and connecting the east with the west and the north with the south for the first time. My grandparents’ family grew not only in wealth but in business and in number (provided by my lovely aunts who attracted good suitors). This was also a way of introducing a new influx of blood and tastes, most notably an interest in politics, which was added to their special inclination to music. Most of my uncles and my father played musical instruments, and they had a band that was the center of any gathering in Laboulaye, as well as in the surrounding small towns.

My mother, Teresa, the fourth of five children born to my grandmother Dominga Pelleriti and my grandfather Sebastian Pagano, was raised in the town of San Martin, a short distance from Rivadavia. Both were located east of the city of Mendoza. My grandparents were in the exportation business, and my grandfather Sebastian was very successful. My grandmother Dominga was fourteen when she first met Sebastian. The encounter was a very special one because Dominga and her parents had been visiting from Messina, Italy, and they were staying with some members of the Pelleriti family who were already in San Martin and ran a general store. It was in that store that Sebastian met Dominga, and she eventually decided not to return to Italy with her parents but instead stayed in San Martin and married Sebastian. In fact, she never went back to Italy or saw her parents again. My grandmother Dominga was very close to us until she died at 94. She was a person with an extraordinary valor and willpower. I loved her, and she was an integral part of our childhood, participating in very important moments of our lives.

My grandfathers, Jose Russo and Sebastian Pagano, had been friends in Italy as both were from Catania. Sebastian was an opera lover and traveled to Buenos Aires often to enjoy good opera at the Colon Theatre. Because Laboulaye had become a main stop on the railroad from Mendoza to Buenos Aires, it was also a common stop for Sebastian to visit his friend Jose. This friendship meant that both families were known to each other, and it was common custom for the Russos to visit the Paganos family and vice versa.

However, my father, Felipe, was unknown to the Paganos because in a certain way he was an irritation to his family. He was the only one of the Russos who did not embrace the liberal political ideas held by most of the town. To easily understand this difference, extrapolate that Argentina’s Democratic Party is akin to the United States’ Republican Party, and the Radical Party is similar to the Democratic Party. Political ideas ran very strong in the Argentina of those days.

The Democratic Party, or in Spanish “Partido Democrata,” started as early as 1852 but became known as PD in 1931. The party supported the idea of preserving and promoting traditional values and social institutions in the context of culture and civilization and mainly social hierarchy by emphasizing stability and continuity. The PD governed Argentina for almost four decades, and with the help of Great Britain, Argentina maintained neutrality in both world wars. This allowed Argentina to provide grains and beef to the rest of the world that was struggling with wars. In the early 1940s, the PD started to lose energy and was overtaken by Radicalism and Peronism. However, it maintained hegemony in a few places like Mendoza, which was a stronghold for their conservative ideas. The province eventually became a showcase for a nation in crisis by showing that conservative ideals, and not the populism of the Radicals, were the right path.

The Republican Party, or Union Civica Radical (UCR), was founded by Leandro N. Alem in 1891, and although it had gone through different periods, it was fundamentally based in “laicism,” a political system characterized by the exclusion of ecclesiastical control and influence, an egalitarian society believing in the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities. The UCR helped to establish the obligatory vote and a liberal populist position. The spark of the UCR was to oppose the predominance of the Democratic Party and the conservative vision for the development of Argentina as a nation.

In 1940, in the middle of the Second World War, there was a confrontation between both Conservatism and Radicalism, and the newly emerging ideas of Peronism, which used the populist basis of Radicalism to create a new party and put forward Domingo Peron as a predominant player in Argentinean politics. The nationalist and populist vision of Peron convinced many Radicals to leave their party and embrace Peronism.

The important point is that in 1941 my father had a political dispute not only with his family but with the whole town, which was Radical. The main issue was that my father accused them of being “pancistas,” meaning opportunistic and parasites, because they changed their ideologies and principles to get a political position created by the collusion between Radicals and Peronists. The Russos now had two sons-in-law who were Radical politicians, each running for a different position. My father was a thorn for the family. He could not accept Radicalism easily, and in the new collusion between Radicals and Peronists, he saw a lack of principles evidenced by how they changed their views in order to get a place in the government. He never accepted this lack of principles, which went even deeper and in fact, had been the root of Argentina’s political corruption, getting a favor to be paid by another favor to reach their aims. In this environment of favoritism, the merit of a person was lost along the way and favor was the passport for obtaining things. This process became so deeply rooted that even small things were obtained using this exchange of favors. My father was against all of that, and it was natural that he turned to be an irritation to more than one person. It was in this situation that my grandfather Jose decided that his son needed some breathing space to ventilate his brain, and for that reason, Felipe was sent to the Paganos in San Martin. The Paganos did not care too much about politics as they were more interested in business; they were basically merchants. My mother and godfather, Natalio, the youngest of the family, were the only ones that received formal training in the craft of tailoring women’s and men’s clothes. My father’s visit to the Paganos was unexpected but accepted because he was from a family known to them, but they had never heard about him. This is an indication of how rebellious my father must have been considered by the rest of the family and was probably the reason why my grandfather Russo never talked about his son Felipe. But the history of my life starts with these small, unrelated but interwoven stories because my father met my mother, Teresa, on that visit, and both of them felt an immediate attraction. My mother used to tell us that the first thing that caught her notice was his voice. She said it didn’t hurt that Felipe was slim and good-looking, but it was the way he spoke Castellan that attracted her the most. They had a short engagement and married in May of 1941. My mother was only 18 and my father 28 years old. My father established himself as a cabinetmaker in Rivadavia, and I was born there. Although the family that he and my mother established was never wealthy, and we belonged to the middle class in Argentina, he never lost his belief in the conservative ideals and turned a vociferous anti-Peronist.

My father was a carpenter and a cabinetmaker, and in his own right a special man who knew how to dress and carry himself as a gentleman while never afraid to express his opinions. The older I became the more I understood his conduct, and I inherited from him a distaste and profound aversion to asking favors of my friends, especially for nominations for prizes or positions of honor. My distaste for lobbying has resulted in many cases where I have been passed by others with less merit and credentials. The root of my position became clearer to me later in my life, and it will be discussed in Chapter 2. The most painful thing for me is to ask somebody to write a recommendation letter, which is a common practice even in the research environment these days. Personally, I never pay any attention to the recommendation letters that I receive in grant or employment applications. Only my personal evaluation in the interviews gives me the moral compass of a candidate. Coming back to my father, I want to clarify that his aversion to favoritism did not mean that he didn’t help people — on the contrary, he never left a friend in need but he did so without expecting anything in return. He had a sense of moral obligation toward his entire family, although I was not sure that it was reciprocated, but for him it was important to keep the bonds with his family until he died at 92. He maintained a continuous communication with his family, and he used to travel to Laboulaye twice a year to see his mother and then after she passed to stay in contact with his brothers and sisters that still lived there. He declined his share of their inheritance because he felt one of his younger brothers was more in need than him, and that our family did not need the extra money, even though I know now that we did not have much in those days. In certain ways, he was a real conservative man who was confident in his own hard work and great ability to craft things. Those were his assets.

The best demonstration of my father’s character was how he sustained the family when my mother became very sick with tuberculosis (TBC) after my sister was born. In that period of our family, we were in need of money, and my father worked 12–14 hours a day to keep the money flowing for my mother’s treatment. He even sold some of his tools while still maintaining his shop, and he started over and over again without despairing or giving up. In those days, very few people in Argentina had health insurance, and there was no social welfare system to provide a safety net for those who were in need. The treatment of TBC today is basically two months of taking isoniazid, rifampin, and pyrazinamide, followed by four months of isoniazid and streptomycin, but this treatment was unknown by practicing physicians in 1944 — even penicillin was an experimental drug at that time. Although streptomycin was first isolated on October 19, 1943, by Albert Schatz, a PhD student in the Waksman laboratory at Rutgers University [1,2], it was not marketed until many years later. In 1952, Waksman was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in recognition for his discovery of streptomycin, the first antibiotic active against TBC.

But back in 1944 when my mother contracted TBC, one of the most promising treatments was a salt of gold that was marketed by a firm in Copenhagen. It was called “Sanacrysin,” and was extremely expensive due to the nature of the compound and the cost of importing it. This salt was first tested on thirty patients who showed a significant improvement, spurring demand for it. Gold compounds were initially introduced based on the reputation of Robert Koch, who had found gold cyanide effective against M. tuberculosis in cultures, but not in experimentally infected animals. Yet, treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis with these compounds was popular, particularly with Danish physicians, in the mid-1920s, despite consistently negative experimental results [3,4]. So that was the treatment that my mother received, and she recovered but maintained a frail appearance all her life, although she saw us grow and accomplish our dreams and was 77 years old when she passed away. Probably because of her illnesses, she was more contemplative than my father; she had a compassionate soul and was a good listener and companion to those who were in need. She was the balm that made our lives sweeter and was my confidante for life.

1.2.Memories of my early childhood

I have few memories of my early childhood before I was 7 years old, but they are vivid ones — not the collection of facts told by my parents.

When I was a small child, I remember sleeping in my father’s arms, and that I placed my hands on his neck or held his hand as I fell asleep. My father was an anchor of safety and protection against the many ghosts that permeated my mind as a child.

The other memory that comes to me often is when I was walking in the house of my grandmother Dominga in San Martin. The house had an indoor patio surrounded by the living quarters, and at the end of the patio was a garden, and in the garden, hanging from a wire, was the dried skin of a goat that had been slaughtered, probably for a special occasion. I must have been very small because I remember that my mother was walking behind me to be sure that I did not wander off or fall. But what’s interesting is that I was fascinated by the way the goat skin looked suspended in the air, clearly delineated against the sky and illuminated by the strong sun of the summer and me extending my hands to reach and touch it. The meaning is still unknown to me, but it has been fixed in my mem...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Chapter 1 My Childhood (1942–1954)
• Chapter 2 Agustin Alvarez National College (1955–1959)
• Chapter 3 The Medical School and My Research in Experimental Pathology (1960–1966)
• Chapter 4 Irma, the Turning Point
• Chapter 5 My Postdoctoral Years in Argentina (1967–1971)
• Chapter 6 My Training in the USA (1972–1973)
• Chapter 7 The Breast Cancer Virus and the Viral Team (1973–1976)
• Chapter 8 The Breast Cancer Research Laboratory (BCRL) (Defining the Aims 1973–1978)
• Chapter 9 The Breast Cancer Research Laboratory — Part 1 (Expanding the Wings 1979–1991)
• Chapter 10 The Breast Cancer Research Laboratory — Part 2 (Expanding the Wings 1979–1991)
• Chapter 11 The Peak of the Mountain (1991–2002)
• Chapter 12 Accomplishments, Sickness, and Death
• Chapter 13 Rebuilding My Life
• Chapter 14 My Legacy
• Index