Thrill of discovery still motivates him
It was the mice that captured the boy's attention. They were deformed, he recalled, bigger than normal and oddly colored. The scientists were doing research on them, and a young Harold ''Hal" Dvorak thought that sounded interesting.
Decades after this visit to a Maine laboratory on a family vacation, Dvorak, now 68, stands watching mice once more. This time they are his mice. He runs his own lab down the street from Fenway Park. And there is a chance that his mice hold secrets that could help doctors stop the spread of cancer.
Dvorak points to their tiny ears. In them, you can see a tangle of blood vessels, pinkish red like any others. But these, he explains, are not just any blood vessels. They are the sort of vessels that tumors use to grow and spread, a process he first helped identify in the late 1970s and continues to study today.
Quietly, in the shadow of others, Dvorak has become a world-renowned expert on these vessels. He authored papers in 1979 and again in 1983 that changed the very face of cancer research, identifying the source that allowed tumors to grow, and giving patients hope that perhaps a cure was possible.
Hype followed. The cure did not. But hope is still alive today, partly because of Dvorak's work on angiogenesis, the process by which blood vessels grow and spread, often to feed tumors. And now for the first time in 26 years, the affable, silver-haired scientist has left his job as chief of pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital and returned to the lab full-time.
''The charge I get out of it is seeing something for the first time that nobody has ever seen before," Dvorak said of his work. ''That's priceless. It's a rush, and it's unbelievably exciting. It only happens a few times in a career."
One of those times came for Dvorak in the late 1970s as he examined a run-of-the-mill guinea pig tumor. He had seen them countless times before. But in this one, Dvorak saw something new through his microscope: the same clotting agent that appears in a wound. He paused.
''Oddly, nobody had seen this before," Dvorak recalled recently. And that fact made him question the discovery. But further research proved him to be right. The same molecule that helps form blood clots in a wound was at work inside the tumor. Only, unlike a wound, which stops making this molecule when it heals, tumors continue to produce it, Dvorak determined, allowing the cancer to grow and spread, unchecked.
It became known as vascular endothelial growth factor -- or VEGF (pronounced vej-f) -- and Dvorak, who had intended to focus on immunology not cancer research, was suddenly at the center of the storm.
''We got a lot of press attention," said his wife and fellow researcher, Dr. Ann Dvorak. ''It was a little bit befuddling for a while." It didn't last. Dr. Stephen Galli, the pathology chair at Stanford University, said Dvorak never sought the spotlight that shined on other cancer researchers. Often these days, Dvorak's name doesn't even get mentioned in news reports about new cancer-fighting drugs designed to stop the production of VEGF.
But people in the medical community haven't forgotten Dvorak. Former Beth Israel president Mitchell Rabkin hailed Dvorak's VEGF work as one of the major intellectual accomplishments to ever come out of Harvard. And at a party last month to celebrate his 26 years as pathology chair, Dvorak couldn't duck the spotlight no matter where he went.
There were speeches about him and toasts in his honor. And then Dvorak himself got up to speak. He had lots of people to thank. But mostly, he wanted to remind them that his work wasn't done just yet, that they could still find him in his lab with his mice, where he likes to be most of all.
''Do come and visit," he said.
