Happy Monday! After a six-week siege of having a bad back, I went to the driving range and hit some golf balls on Saturday, and did not suffer any adverse outcomes (other than having to watch the results of my shots). I was hoping to go hit some golf balls at the driving range yesterday, but the weather was unexpectedly miserable, so I chose to work at home and watch some football games instead. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday, and I spared my back extra stress to boot.
Harriet and I saw a couple of movies over the weekend – First, Silver Linings Playbook (terrific, and a real slice of life for a native Philadelphian) and then Zero Dark Thirty (also terrific, but we liked Argo more, and I liked Lincoln better than any of them, including Les Mis). We love movies, but don’t get to enough – this is the first time we have actually seen most of the leading Oscar contenders in theaters in a number of years.
Don’t be fooled into thinking I have had a lot of time to catch movies at the expense of work. If only it were so! I am on the site visit team for an upcoming CCSG review, and find that by critically reviewing another center’s proposal I am learning a lot about what works and what does not – it will be helpful for our CCSG renewal. Internal and external reviews of our draft sections are trickling in, and we’ll be poring over them in the next week or two. We still have an awful lot of work to do, but I think we are in pretty good shape.
I had a couple of terrific meetings with Waddah Al-Refaie last week. Waddah is MGUH’s new Chief of Surgical Oncology and Georgetown Lombardi’s Surgeon in Chief. We met to discuss his research plans, with Arnie Potosky’s involvement, and then met with Neil Weissman from MHRI to discuss ways to develop a Surgical Outcomes Center that utilizes cutting edge methods in health outcomes research. I think Waddah is going to be a major contributor at Georgetown Lombardi, and look forward to helping him succeed.
I also had a fascinating visit to Walter Reed on Wednesday to meet with Col. Craig Shriver and his team, as they develop the John Murtha Cancer Center, which aspires to be a comprehensive cancer center. There are enormous opportunities for collaboration, and I will be assembling some teams to consider ways to leverage these opportunities.
On Thursday morning I attended the NCI Intramural Program retreat at the Reagan Building in my role a s a member of the NCI Board of Scientific Counselors. The morning plenary session contained two talks, one of which related the work of Dick Schlegel and his role in developing the HPV vaccine, while another talk focusing on Ezrin in sarcoma made explicit reference to collaborations with Aykut Uren. Not bad!
That afternoon I had a busy clinic, and ended up seeing my young patient with metastatic colon cancer, now progressive on standard chemotherapy. He has agreed to enroll in a clinical trial of chemotherapy plus a PARP inhibitor, which is led by Mike Pishvaian. I am delighted to be able to offer him something new, but the feeling of impotence as his cancer marches on is nothing short of harrowing. I can only imagine what it is like for him, his wife and what this ultimately will mean for his young children. As clinic ended I hustled over to the Leavey Center to bid a fond farewell to Herb Herscowitz at his retirement ceremony. Herb is a true Georgetown hero, and he will be missed. I will particularly miss him when I have to give the immunology lectures he used to give to the medical students!
Have a great week.