I'm an epidemiologist who has mostly worked on studies of cancer and longevity.
Last year I discovered -- quite out of the blue -- that I had multiple myeloma. MM is a blood cancer that is almost certainly fatal, but there is a wide range of survival times, from a few months to 10 or more years. A few people seem to have been "cured," but for the most part they have unusual circumstances (like an identical twin to serve as a stem cell donor).
So much for the longevity research. There's a lot of really interesting work being done there, but I suspect I will miss the key advances in the field. Good luck to y'all.
So my plan here is to describe the experience of a scientist who knows a lot about how cancer works and a fair amount about how the biomedical research infrastructure works, but has no credentials (or expertise!) in any kind of clinical setting, when my focus has suddenly changed from finding patterns in the experience of hundreds or thousands of other people to one of me.
About the title of this blog . . . for about 12 years I worked as an epidemiologist in a research setting dominated by bench scientists who struggled to envision how "the Kerber lab" functioned without a visible laboratory space. Over the years I portrayed the "lab" as a computer, an MRI scan of my brain, or just a list of people we collaborated with. It was an inside joke, and not very funny.
Now I see myself as the only lab that matters to me. If I don't respond (or respond badly) to a drug, we swap that for something else. The past, or the projected future, is the control for the present. The control is not perfect, because we can't prevent any number of other things from changing over time, especially when I am an aging man with a deadly chronic disease, but there is a lot of information in the series of events and all the tests that go along with it.
Soon I will undergo a stem cell transplant. I hope to report on the stages, the experience, and the outcome, and a number of other things along the way. At the least, I hope it will reduce the quantity and bulk of emails to friends and family.
