Judah Folkman Interview (page: 3 / 6) Cancer Research	Print Interview

As a young person, what person do you think most inspired you?

Judah Folkman: A lot of inspiration came from father and mother, and then there were the teachers I mentioned. There were also two members of the congregation who had a big influence.

While I was in high school, I always seemed to have to work much harder at math. I mentioned that. It seemed to come hard. So there was a mathematician in the congregation named Ben Eisner. His hobby was mathematics, but he was in business. But he was a terrific mathematician. And he decided that every Saturday afternoon, whenever -- he would call every Saturday morning, say, "Are you free?" and if I was -- it was about once a month -- he would come out for about three hours, both my brother and myself, and we would just do problems, but only -- no paper. He would say, "Do it in your head." So he would just sit there and he'd say, "Now let's see, this train is going this fast, this train's coming this fast," and, and then, tell us something. And I would say, "Well, I need a piece of paper." He said, "No, you don't." And he would say, "Just imagine a track that's one foot, and another track that's a half-foot, and then imagine the velocity is such and such, and how fast will you traverse that?"
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Then he went into statistics. All kinds of practical mathematics. Wind speed, air speed, everything. It lasted about two years. He did it totally voluntarily. I never knew why. Dad must have mentioned something to him, and he offered to do it.

There was another member of the congregation who worked in a varnish factory. He was the chemist, the analytical chemist for a varnish factory, and he said -- this was in high school -- "If you have time on Thursday afternoons, if you could, want to come by?" And then in the summer -- so in the summer I worked for him, and measuring mixed ratios of solvents to paint and everything, and he was always doing the quality control. But he had a big chemistry lab. And so I learned a lot from him about what chemistry was like on a practical way, and how you had to be very careful about the numbers. So you did a little experiment on a bench, but if you were off three decimal places and it went to a 100,000 gallon production, the company'd go bankrupt. So he said, "What I'm doing is very important. The decimal places are important." So that was a good lesson about accuracy.
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What books influenced you as a young person?

Judah Folkman: There were always books in the house. Dad had something like 4,000 books. There were books everywhere, by his bed, by our bed. Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis was a very important book to me. It was about a physician who saw the disease process, and saw that it could be improved, and actually took on the task himself, of trying to make improvement. And the book by Paul DeKruif, The Microbe Hunters, which I read in junior high, about physicians trying to improve things, 'cause at that time, like today, in certain areas, medicine is really primitive.

Medicine seems very advanced now, but not if you have a brain tumor. It's as primitive as it was then. And not if you have leukemia and other kinds of disease. So those books were very influential.

You were very focused. Did you have other activities or hobbies?

Judah Folkman: Well, yes. I worked as a caddie on a golf course, and was in a chess club, and a lot of things. I didn't have sports as a hobby, as most do. To me, the science seemed to be a hobby. There was a Science Club. There were six of us, and we made radios, and did experiments, and we all entered the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. We never got anywhere but we tried it. There was an experiment that I did with another friend, Dick Wolfe. His father owned the Columbus Dispatch, newspaper. He was well-off and he could pay for experiments.

We found that when you bought a goldfish they never stop growing, which was fascinating. The goldfish person told us they always grow. So we had it in an aquarium at school, and we had built a measuring device on the side, so when the fish went by we could get a reading of his length, and every day we plotted it, and every day it grew, and it was on the wall. And the other students would come by just fascinated. It looked like the stock market, it was always going up.

And we changed the water on a regular basis and added the food in excess. Then we added two more fish, and they had plenty of food, but they all dropped down to a slower growth curve. And then we added four, and when we had nine fish, I think it was, they stopped growing. Yet we were changing water as fast as we could, and adding new food, so it was not lack of food. So it became clear that they were talking to each other about crowding. We'd take five fish out and the others would start to grow. It took all the school year, but it was quite interesting.

That's the one we sent in for the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. We had just gotten to the point of saying maybe if we take the water and put it through a cellophane bag in a dialysis, and see if we can find whatever this thing is, is big or small, we hadn't finished that, and I think that's why we didn't even get an honorable mention. But it was an exciting experiment.

In high school, I began to work just briefly, in the hospital, first in the clinical labs, but then as an orderly in the operating room, to see if I wanted to be a surgeon. And so while I was doing that in about junior year in high school, the Chief of Surgery at Columbus, the University Hospital, Robert Zollinger, a very famous surgeon, stopped me, and he knew the family, and he knew me. He said, "You're wasting your time doing this. If you want to be a surgeon, why don't you go to school at Ohio State and come and work in my surgical laboratory where they're training surgical residents on operations on dogs." That's a standard, that was the standard. "And you can work in the afternoon and help them." And his idea was that he'd always been looking for somebody who knew that they want to be a surgeon, very early. He felt that surgeons should, like violinists and pianists and dancers, start early, instead of waiting till 25 years old. And he said you can learn the anatomy later; do the skills.
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So I went to Ohio State, and for three years, every afternoon, about one o'clock, I would go from classes to his laboratory and operate as a first assistant for his resident surgeons. After a while, I got good enough that they would call up and say, "I'm late, get started." We would do a gastrectomy, or whatever operation they were working on. And then they'd call up and say, "I can't get there, finish up. Do the whole operation." And I was able to do that. So that was a terrific beginning.

How old were you?

Judah Folkman: I was a junior in high school. I started as a orderly in junior high school, but then all the way through college, for three years at Ohio State University, I was in the dog lab in the afternoons.

They would come and go, but I was always there as the assistant. I was helping the surgeons, and I worked very hard at trying to learn how to tie the knots fast and do all that. There was a point at which one of them said, "You have good hands." That's the way they say it. I remember that, because you never know if you can do anything. Then you get a single compliment that can last for years, because you get self-confidence that maybe you can actually do this. I've learned to do that with young surgeons that I'm teaching, or young scientists who are in our laboratory. Their self-confidence is pretty shaky, but you can build it up so that they keep going.

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