LYNN SORBARA WOWS AUDIENCE WITH TALK ON CANCER RESEARCH
For our 5th program this year, we were very pleased to have one of our own as speaker, Lynn Sorbara, Of course Lynn was familiar to most of the audience as the current AMHS 2nd Vice-President following several years as a board member. This very successful event was held on September 24, 2017, at Carmine’s Restaurant a few blocks from Casa Italiana.
Before the program began, a vote was taken by AMHS members on whether to affiliate with NIAF again next year (see results of this vote in the President’s message) and then the 65 participants enjoyed a delicious lunch.
The favorable comments after the talk were immediate and numerous, and Lynn really wowed the audience with the depth of her knowledge and ability to communicate it to everyone. She made copies of her PowerPoint presentation for each person in the audience with room to take notes, as well as a list of cancer drugs, and then answered questions from the audience after her talk.
Perhaps not all our members knew that Lynn’s day job is as a cancer expert at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. She is currently Program Director in NCI’s Division of Cancer Prevention. So we know Lynn must be smart, but maybe not everyone knows that Lynn is also fun-loving—and funny—and she has a million wonderful stories to tell. Many of them concern her immigrant family and growing up in Queens, New York. Stories like the pigeon club (apparently that was a thing among Italians back in the day) and like how her relatives in Louisiana tangled with the KKK (you can guess who came out on top!!).
So before beginning her talk, she showed family photos and shared with us a little bit about growing up with Italian immigrant parents who assimilated here while still maintaining their Italian traditions. Lynn’s father was from Polistena, Calabria and her mother was from Resuttano, Sicily (near Caltanisetta) and together they settled in Queens, with no money and no English. They raised a family which included their daughter Lynn, who earned a Ph.D. from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, N.Y. An amazing success story in one generation!!
And Lynn told us it was her father’s death at the age of 42, when she was just a child, that really prompted her interest in medicine. And then of course Lynn talked to us about the topics she is very familiar with—advances in cancer research: What is known? What remains challenging? What are the future possibilities? Lynn broke it all down for us in layman’s terms, beginning with how the ancients dealt with what we now know as cancer, continuing on up to the new treatments of today and the possibilities of tomorrow. She told us that an ancient Egyptian scroll dating back to 2630 B.C. dealt with the most ancient method of treatment—the observation of the patient.
Then Hippocrates—of the famous Hippocratic Oath—came along in 460 B.C., followed by Pythagoras. She explained that cancer is really an umbrella term, it’s not just one disease, like tuberculosis or smallpox. She said there is not just one type of cancer, there are a whole lot of them. For example, she said there are 72 types of lymphoma and it is important to know which kind is diagnosed, because the treatments are different. And she said that when a person has one type of cancer, such as breast cancer, which spreads to other organs of the body, that is still only breast cancer— which has just metastasized to other parts of the body. She explained to us the risk factors of getting cancer, such as age, family history and obesity, and she said there are some steps we can take to minimize the risk, such as exercising, eating well, and not smoking.
She told us about some of the innovative research going on, for example, studying truffle-sniffing dogs to see if we can develop ways to breathe into devices so signs of certain cancers can be picked up, and using bodily fluids to detect cancer in the early stages. Lynn noted that when she started in the cancer research field 35 years ago, she would never have imagined the tremendous progress that has taken place.
For example, in the field of DNA sequencing, what used to take 13 years at a cost of $1 billion now takes 1 or 2 days at a cost of $3,000 to $5,000. That’s pretty amazing progress!! We thank Lynn and her colleagues for the important work they are doing, and we hope the future brings more important breakthroughs.