Where I Stand — Brian Greenspun: How to beat cancer

Friday, Dec. 3, 2004 | 6:15 a.m.

Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.

WEEKEND EDITION

December 4 - 5, 2004

The Fortune Magazine cover story this week started like this:

"The image on the oversized screen behind the podium was of a giant malignant tumor. The discussion was about prognostic indicators -- doctorspeak for how much longer people with such tumors had to live. The prognosis wasn't good, with life expectancy measured in months, not years. The presenter's manner was cold, but it didn't matter: This was no hospital bedside but a roomful of physicians, gathered for a seminar on prostate cancer at Houston's prestigious MD Anderson Cancer Center. In the third row sat a tall, slight, unimposing man. The top of his middle-aged head no longer had hair; his eyebrows were thin. His name tag read Dr. Robert Hackel, and all he could think about was how enormous the tumor looked on the screen. A tumor just like his.

"When the speaker, Donald Coffey, an esteemed prostate cancer expert from Johns Hopkins, was finished, Hackel made his way to the front. For 25 minutes he grilled Coffey on his presentation, asking technical questions about the research and its therapeutic implications. At what should have been the end of a friendly exchange between colleagues, Hackel turned to Coffey and said, "I am Mike Milken. I want to be cured."

The rest of that almost 12-page article tells one of the most important stories about one of the most important men of our time. Fortune is a business magazine but "Beating Cancer, Why leaders from Lance Armstrong to Rudy Giuliani have joined Mike Milken's crusade -- and how it's changing medicine," is about so much more than just business. It is about the business of medicine and its impact on the future of the human family.

The year of that conference in Houston was 1993. And Mike Milken, for those who don't remember the name, was the then-infamous junk bond king of Wall Street who had just been released from prison after serving his sentence for violating the securities laws of the United States. He had learned just days after his release that he had prostate cancer and the prognosis was not good. But in typical Milken fashion --with the same energy and passion he brought to his junk bond trading desk at Drexel Burnham and with the same nimbleness of mind that made him the envy of Wall Street through the heydays -- he was not giving up or giving in. If there was a cure for prostate cancer, he was going to find it.

What Milken learned early on was that the world of medical research was still in the dark ages. Researchers spent as much time seeking financial grants as they did on the research itself; the technology available for doing their work, except in the very few labs run by the big drug companies, was antiquated and a part of the problem rather than any solution; secrets were guarded rather than shared with colleagues, a move that hindered research, not helped it; and the few grants that were given by government were made based on what kind of research was safe and incremental rather than what might be revolutionary and, therefore, risky.

It was the perfect setting for a man of Mike's drive, personal determination, and knowledge of people and institutions gained from years of seeing them work from the inside out. But he was only one person, and if he was going to change the world of medical research he would have to have help.

I am not going to repeat the entire Fortune Magazine article. What I am going to do is recommend it to every person in Las Vegas, especially those who have had a loved one, friend or a neighbor whose life has been turned upside down by this horrible disease. That's because "Beating Cancer" is the kind of story that exemplifies what this country has always been about. If you can dream it, you can do it, and what Mike has dreamed of is an America -- a world -- that is cancer free.

Of course, that kind of dreaming doesn't come easy and doesn't come cheap. It just so happens that the man the rest of the world is so very lucky to have driving the cancer-curing train knows how to recruit the finest minds and raise the needed funds. Remember, that's what he used to do -- and he was the best there ever was -- until some overzealous prosecutor decided to make an example of Mr. Milken.

By the way, that prosecutor, the man who made a political career by putting Mike in jail, was Rudy Giuliani. Milken's efforts to cure prostate cancer may have been the reason why Giuliani's life was spared when he was stricken with prostate cancer a few years later. Don't you just love irony?

Mike recently started a think tank called FasterCures. Its mission is to apply what he and his CapCure team have learned and corrected in the world of prostate cancer research to the challenges facing other diseases. Alzheimer's, breast cancer, epilepsy and juvenile diabetes will each be beneficiaries of what Mike has done.

So if you haven't known cancer, you are very lucky. But chances are good you have been acquainted with one of these other miserable afflictions. As and when their cures are found you will have, among others, Mike Milken to thank. He brought simple but elusive ideas to the world of scientific research. Provide the best technology, get rid of stupid policy hurdles, allow scientists to dream instead of filling out grant forms and make them all share what they are doing.

If that sounds like a winning formula for America's business, it should be no surprise that it has come from Mike Milken. So if you didn't remember his name before, that's OK. But mark it down now because it will be a name forever linked to the way this world found the cure for cancer.

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