(http://medicalxpress.com) – Thirty years ago, Professor Richard Gilbertson pledged to implement a 15 per cent reduction in mortality from children’s brain cancer. This is the story of what happened next.
On the children’s ward at Newcastle General Hospital in 1986, medical student Richard Gilbertson got his first taste of life as a paediatric oncologist. He looked around the ward and saw a child in a bed, in a dark corner. “She has a medulloblastoma that has returned,” the consultant said. “What can we do for her?” asked Gilbertson, who had been fascinated by medulloblastomas – one of the commonest malignant brain tumours in children – since his first year of medicine, when he was randomly assigned to do a project on them. “Nothing,” the consultant replied. “The only thing we can do is let her die in peace.”
“I got so angry,” remembers Gilbertson – now Professor – sitting in his airy office on the first floor of the vast glass-and-steel Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute (CRUK CI) at the Li Ka Shing Centre. “It was the 1980s and there was nothing we could do for a child with a brain tumour. That was completely unacceptable to me. And I know it sounds contrived, but I made up my mind from that moment that I was going to do something.”
That ‘something’ was initially a number dreamed up in a Newcastle pub: relaxing with a beer after a long week, Gilbertson and his fellow medical students decided that by the time they retired, they should take personal responsibility for implementing a 15 per cent reduction in mortality, from whatever disease they chose.
Gilbertson never forgot that pledge and, 30 years later, you could argue that he’s fulfilled it. As a result of his insights into how children’s brain tumours behave, more children than ever before are surviving them. However this, he argues, is because of better patient care and understanding of the condition, not more effective treatments, earlier detection or prevention. These are the things, he says, that will fulfil his latest ambition: a world without cancer.