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C. Russell Y. Cruz, MD, PhD 
Senior Editor, ISCT Telegraft
Nationwide Children's Hospital
United States

It is easy to take for granted, this job, this life. In the midst of the chaos from manuscripts and experiments and clinical trials and fund-raising, we tend to forget how special this work is. I was recently reminded of this after a brilliant conversation with ISCT President-Elect, Bambi Grilley, RPh, RAC, CIP, CRC, CCRP, so I thought I'd share some of the thoughts I had following that chat. 

"So...what is it that you do?"

It's an introvert's nightmare, the inevitable mingling at parties and networking events. Thankfully, with what we do, we have a ready answer to this question. Not just a ready answer, in fact, but a spiel: a polished thirty second elevator pitch of what we work on. We sometimes laugh at our own optimistic framing. It sounds corny, after all, changing the world, finding a cure, discovering the new. The secret is that deep down, we all really believe it.

The funny thing is, not only do we have this polished answer to make things less awkward (since we at least don't have to fumble for words on this one), it actually makes us feel better. Often, you find people genuinely impressed and dare I say admiring. Sometimes the reactions come from unexpected places. Kids, for instance, can make the connection immediately. Every now and then, one will ask, "My grandmother had cancer. Are you trying to cure people like her?" It's a simple question, but a powerful reminder of why the work matters. Adults can be just as flattering, albeit in a different way. Every so often someone says, "Man, I'm just a Wall Street derivatives investor. You do the actual important stuff—we just make the money." I usually think to myself: to be fair, they do make a lot of money.

I digress. The job gives me a reason to be proud of it, by default. It's not too boring, but also not too standoffish, like say, being president of a homeowner's association. It pays the bills and doesn't elicit pity looks, but it also doesn't brazenly steal from the coffers of society, the way, say, investing in the misery of others might. A superficial reason to love what we do, to be sure, but reason number one nonetheless.

Misson: Impossible

In all seriousness, though, the job has a built-in mission, a built-in raison d'etre that makes sense. And not the "buzzwordy" corporate kind that doesn’t actually say anything. In fact, you don't have to pay millions of dollars to consultants to come up with our organization's mission, vision, or strategic transformational initiative (though sadly, we sometimes still do, instead of directing those funds towards research). The mission is sum up in a few words. We cure cancer. We cure sickle cell disease. We seek the new. “We boldly go where no one has gone before.” There is no need to pretend that we really value whatever the the glitzy corporate language we find in company opening paragraphs say we value. 

Even if you don't believe it, our mission has the advantage of being true. We are, indeed, here to push the boundaries of human knowledge, incrementally, and occasionally dramatically, improving what we collectively know and passing it on to the next generation. We are here to seek cures for the ills that have plagued most of us for the longest time, and cures for what plagues a smaller number of us only recently. Helping the one; helping the many. We are here to make the quality of life better for everyone. We don't have to repeat a mantra about becoming a transformational engine building the hopes of tomorrow while recklessly cutting down forests to build luxury golf courses, for example.

Which brings me to another unique thing about the work: it is necessarily transient. Perhaps not in our lifetimes, but the job is, after all, to eliminate the reason for its own existence. The goal is to never need to do it again, or at least not for specific settings. Once we find a cure for cancer, the hope is that we never have to worry about it again. Then we can move on to other diseases, or other sources of knowledge.

That goal is sometimes enough for us to ignore the crazy amount of politics that goes on, which is a sort of rebuttal to the famous quote, “Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so low.” I have only briefly worked in other fields, so I can't say how much political and administrative nonsense occurs elsewhere, but the amount in academic research is mind boggling. 

If you know me, you've probably heard me rail on more than one occasion against administrative bloat. To say I hate the creation of new positions purely to satisfy egos (and the attendant new policies/new logos/new email addresses we have to adopt) is an understatement. The administrative bloat mafia is sadly one of the more prominent features of this work, but on the flip side, we actually have a strong anti-administrative bloat contingent: unsung staff essential to the mission that we can actually feel proud about.

We all know the story of the janitor at NASA who met the president and said he was helping bring a man to the moon in response to what he does there. We see the same thing in our own places. Where I work, we have Brenda, who cleans and takes great pride in making sure our space is spotless and ready for visitors, comfortable for our students, and safe for our researchers. She takes her job in EVS very seriously and is proud that we're here to discover cures, never mind that she doesn't fully understand the science. She keeps our students company when they're here late at night. Or Colby, who heads our admin assistants, always arriving with cheerfulness and enthusiasm. She helps with everything from MTAs to organizing events, all without adding any extra burden on us (and certainly not needing to be on the front page). She points you in the right direction instead of adopting the "not my job" attitude that too many members of the administrative bloat mafia unfortunately have. I suppose this isn't unique to the biomedical sciences, but it's one of those contrasts that I find fascinating. 

Meeting People

Finally, this is a job where we get to meet some of the most interesting colleagues. First, we meet some of the most brilliant minds, the most creative minds: minds who question and value questions more than answers, as Feynman wrote; minds who view things as puzzles or mysteries; minds who can't wait to discuss ideas with you; minds who have reshaped how we understand the world. One of our favourite things to do as scientists is act as groupies of sorts. Every time we get to attend a lecture by a Nobel laureate, we try to get pictures with them and collect their autographs. Where else would you find a job that routinely gives you access to real change makers, the people who brought us technologies like CRISPR and RNAi, or who discovered and worked on hepatitis C or checkpoint blockade?

We also get to meet people of wildly different backgrounds within the same field: investors, entrepreneurs, industry professionals, teachers, and technicians. We are, in a real sense, a village, and a gloriously diverse one that treats everyone as equal. Nowhere is that better captured, I think, than in ISCT, where equal billing goes to all the different professionals who make up the international society, not just the clinicians and high profile scientists. Here, we take great pride in featuring technical advances, optimizations, better bioreactors, innovative companies, new commercial products, and debates on policy and regulatory affairs.

We get to meet patients and patient advocates, hear their heartbreaking stories, and, at the same time, learn from their courage. I am fortunate to receive funding raised by foundations born out of grief: the Bear Necessities Pediatric Cancer Foundation, Alex's Lemonade Stand, the Warrior Jace Foundation. We also meet extraordinary businessmen who have dedicated their extracurricular work to funding cancer research. Organizations like Hyundai Hope on Wheels, for example, come to mind.

We get to mentor the next generation of talent, to see brilliance in its raw form and have a hand in shaping it and watching it develop. It isn't everywhere that you rejoice in seeing people surpass you, but here, that's actually a perk.

We get to meet all these people and hear their stories. And then carry those stories with us.

All Good Things

With funding drying up, with the financial strain most academic institutions are under, and with research positions becoming increasingly competitive, we're seeing more and more scientists leave the field, voluntarily or otherwise.

I, too, don't know how long I'll be allowed to keep doing what we all love. But if it were to stop tomorrow, if it stopped because I could no longer bring in funding for our center, it would not diminish the gratitude I have for being given this extraordinary privilege.