THE WORDS that colleagues and collaborators are using to describe Dr. Judah Folkman, who died Monday at age 74, are usually reserved for artists, not scientists. They talk of his freshness and creativity, his willingness to think outside conventional wisdom. They pay special tribute to the confidence that allowed him to persevere in the face of other scientists' skepticism. For years, his perception that interfering with cancer cells' blood supply could slow or halt their growth yielded few results, but he kept working - and ended up a pioneer in a new field of cancer treatment.
Indeed, Folkman became a scientific celebrity in 1998, when DNA scientist and Nobel laureate James Watson predicted that Folkman would cure cancer in two years. Folkman did not cure cancer, but many patients are living longer because of drugs that grew out of his work. These angiogenesis inhibitors, which stop blood vessel formation, are also being used for other illnesses, such as the eye disease macular degeneration.
While medical research is replete with scientists who give up on avenues of research after unpromising results, progress often depends on those who keep at it. Folkman did.
Folkman dealt in a typically level-headed way with the instant celebrity status that Watson's statement gave him. He dodged a chance to go before TV cameras, emphasized that his early success came on experiments with mice, not human beings, and said that the drugs would likely be added to standard chemotherapy medications or used in conjunction with other cancer therapies. His modesty in front of TV cameras was part of a 30-year practice to avoid the medium because he believed it focused too much on one individual and did not permit thorough scientific explanations.
But if there was an individual scientist whose work ethic, inventiveness, and helpfulness with co-workers at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital deserved media attention, it was Folkman. "The breadth and freshness with which he looked at things, that was unusual," said Douglas Hanahan of the University of California at San Francisco, a longtime collaborator. Folkman was willing to put out new ideas - some right and some wrong - in a way, said Hanahan, that many other scientists would not, for fear of being considered naive. That virtue stood him in good stead during the 30 years of basic work on his theory about tumor blood supply when many other scientists paid him little heed.
Now, as Children's president Dr. Jim Mandell noted yesterday, Folkman's discoveries are the basis for billions of dollars worth of research all over the world. That is one monument to his career, but so is the example that he set of scientific imagination and tenacity.
