Planet Science : As the new chief of UCLA’s cancer center, Judith Gasson is up to her elbows in flasks, petri dishes and paperwork. And she revels in all of it.
Judith Gasson’s on the way out the door of her research lab when a colleague stops her.
“Wait a minute,” the lab tech says, handing her a tissue and a mirror.
“Hazard of the job,” Gasson says with a sigh, dabbing at black smudges under her eyes, courtesy of the microscope she’s been staring into for the last half an hour.
Such close encounters with lab tools are rare now that Gasson, 44, has assumed her new post as director of UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. She started the job in September after being plucked from a field of 30 candidates to succeed founding director Dr. Richard Steckel. Gasson is the only woman to head one of this country’s 27 comprehensive cancer centers and one of a very few who is a scientist rather than a physician.
As top administrator she now oversees about 300 researchers, physicians and clinicians spread throughout the campus--all concerned with the disease that this year will take more than half a million lives. Toward that goal, she has her hands in fund-raising and grant-writing, a daunting prospect as tough economic times show no immediate signs of waning.
She also still runs her lab, which has been engaged in bone marrow cell research for 11 years, and she teaches as a full professor at the School of Medicine and the department of biochemistry.
Her new office is evidence of a busy transition. Blond wood shelves hold a scant few books and personal items; a vase here, a plant there. “I’ve moved in psychologically but not physically,” Gasson says, easing her tall frame into a chair. The screen saver on the computer shows an endless trail of stars in a black universe.
By the turn of the century, she says, cancer will probably beat out heart disease as the leading cause of death in America. Still, she is amazingly optimistic--the trait her peers single out as a secret of her success--about potential breakthroughs.
“The war on cancer that’s been waged over the last 20 to 25 years has really been in the basic research laboratories. I’m a basic researcher, and molecular biologists and geneticists have uncovered [a great deal about cancer cells], and this has resulted in an explosion of information.”
Gasson wants to take that information and work with physicians to improve cancer prevention, detection and patient care. This is part of the mandate of the National Cancer Institute, she explains. To be designated as a comprehensive cancer center, an institution must not only excel in all facets of research but also provide education for future scientists and physicians, plus create community outreach programs.
Gasson plans to spend a lot of time with the center’s foundation, as well as with people outside the medical / scientific community. She wants them to see firsthand what the center does. She also hopes to bring together staffers from medicine, research, life sciences and clinical trial programs to “get them to talk about ideas and take advantage of their expertise. . . . We need to do that if we’re going to make any progress in these diseases,” Gasson says.
She knows the sweet taste of a major breakthrough, although she prefers to call laboratory research a “series of steps.” In the early ‘80s, Gasson and her colleagues purified the first human blood cell growth factor, called GM-CSF. The growth factors are used to quicken the reproduction of bone marrow cells, which help prevent infections and make chemotherapy and radiation more tolerable. They have also considerably shortened the time it takes cancer patients who have had bone marrow transplants to rebuild their white cell counts.
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Visiting Gasson’s research lab is like dropping onto Planet Science, where the natives speak a bizarre language and petri dishes, flasks and obscure reference books crowd countertops and shelves in organized disarray.
Wearing a white lab coat over a navy jacket and wide-legged navy floral pants, Gasson apologizes for the clutter but explains that this is typical. She leads an outsider through, dismayed that no one is around “feeding” cells.
Her seldom-silent beeper goes off again--a call from 9-year-old son Andrew. She chats for a few minutes, then moves on to her next appointment with a laboratory director who has submitted a paper to a medical journal. They lapse into indecipherable science-speak.
Back at her desk, before she can bite into a cafeteria lunch of soup and salad, a maintenance worker interrupts to ask a second time for a letter of recommendation. Gasson apologizes for not doing it sooner and taps it out on her computer.
That done, the conversation turns to the nagging issue of money, and how Gasson and the center’s foundation will have to work harder to get people and institutions to part with it. More scientists, including AIDS researchers, are fighting for fewer government dollars. And charitable donations have declined overall in recent years amid corporate downsizing.
She seems to welcome the challenge, even when it comes to finding backing for the innovative research programs or clinical trials that tend to meet resistance from potential backers.
“I’m extremely optimistic,” Gasson says. “I think that people in this community are really committed. I think that the women who have led the movement toward activism in breast cancer, for example, have awakened in people a desire to do more than be passive or to feel like a victim. Everybody can do something.”
Associates confirm that Gasson’s unflagging enthusiasm is not just for show.
Gerald S. Levey, provost of Medical Sciences and dean of the School of Medicine, says Gasson’s enthusiasm helped clinch the job.
“I was looking for somebody with that, who wanted to tackle a very difficult job. And you know that in life, it’s one’s enthusiasm about tackling a job that makes the difference between success and failure.”
Levey also singles out Gasson’s scientific achievements and organizational and administrative skills, and calls her a “master communicator. . . . We also had a requirement that the person be able to articulate a vision for a cancer center, with the types of research that need to be done and the types of clinical programs that need to be developed.
“Good scientists are very much like Judy,” he adds. “They’re very self-effacing and they’re more about the good they’re doing than seeing their name in print or winning awards. This is the side of medicine and research that unfortunately the public doesn’t see very often.”
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Looking back, Gasson can find no epiphany, no stunning moment that led her to this career. She simply liked science.
She grew up in Denver, the oldest of three children. Her father was president and CEO of a bank, her mother a schoolteacher and homemaker. Her parents emphasized education and were supportive of their daughter’s microbiology major at Colorado State University, even though the concept of graduate school was a little foreign.
“When I did postdoctoral work they really had a hard time,” she recalls, laughing. “They said, ‘What is that? Are you still in school or are you working?’
“At that time in the late ‘60s,” Gasson continues, “women who were interested in science and medicine became medical technologists. So I went to college thinking that’s what I would do. . . . But it was almost like peeling an onion--as I made each decision, like becoming a science major, then options were presented to me for what I could do. If I liked doing research, then maybe I could think about going to graduate school and being a professor and having my own lab and so on. So rather than feeling like my path was becoming more limited, I felt the directions I could take were always expanding.”
Anne Castle, a friend from fifth grade and now a Denver attorney, recalls that Gasson “always had in her mind goals for the future and she didn’t talk a whole lot about them, but she was always very directed in what she did. There wasn’t a lot of wasted effort or diddling around not knowing what she wanted to do. I think that’s helped her achieve what she’s been able to do.”
After getting her doctorate in physiology from the University of Colorado, Gasson headed to the Salk Institute in San Diego in 1979 for postdoctoral work on T-cell leukemias.
During those years she met and married David Kronemyer, then a litigation attorney. Each had friends working on the John Anderson presidential campaign, and Gasson still swears they were the unwitting targets of a matchup.
They moved to Los Angeles in 1982, Gasson to take a post at UCLA as an assistant research biologist to Dr. David Golde, now head of the division of hematologic oncology at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital. Her husband joined another firm and has since become executive vice president of Curb Entertainment, a record company .
They live in a spacious home in Calabasas with Andrew, 6-year-old daughter Lauren, a Shar-Pei, a guinea pig, a lizard and a turtle. Gasson tries to leave mornings open to spend with her kids before making the trek to Westwood.
Golde remembers his first encounter with Gasson. He was impressed by her extensive research background and her “tremendous potential. . . . She looked great in every way, and my only question was, does she have ambition? So I asked her. And her eyes got narrow and she said, ‘You bet I do.’ ”
Nodding her head at the retelling of the story, she says, “I meant to ask him when he was out here recently if he felt he needed to ask me that question anymore.
“I would not at all describe myself as somebody who had to scratch and claw on top of bodies. Some of [my success] I owe to my mentors, and some of it is pure luck. It’s been sort of an evolution of my career; I really like science so I’ll follow this and see where it takes me. I don’t know exactly what that is. I guess it’s ambition, isn’t it? But when I feel challenged by something, I want to accept that challenge and do the best I can.”
Golde is realistic when asked if his former protege will be happy handling the administrative side of the job.
“The honeymoon will end sooner than not, and dealing with day-to-day problems can be bruising,” he says. “The ideal administrator is a bloodless surgeon, but the best surgeon still has to use a knife. I think if she runs into that it will be a learning experience. . . . But I think she’s the kind of person who’s concerned with learning and growing.”
Says Gasson: “I know that there’s a lot of administrative responsibilities that are not the most exciting part of the job, but you have to stay focused on the big picture, which is bringing the scientists and the clinicians together and raising money and supporting programs. What could possibly be a better job?”
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Judith C. Gasson
Age: 44.
Background: Born in Clay Center, Kan.; grew up in Denver; now lives in Calabasas.
Family: Married to record executive David Kronemyer. Two children--Andrew, 9, and Lauren, 6.
Passions: Spending time with family.
On being the only woman in the country to head a comprehensive cancer center: “I think it would be nice if people didn’t notice that I was a woman, or that I was tall or short or whatever race. I think it would be nice if we could get to the point where none of those things mattered and all that did matter was how good a job you did.”
On maintaining her research lab: “My own personal research is important to me. I wouldn’t want to give that up. I think I wouldn’t be a very good administrator if that’s all I did, I think I would lose touch with the real problems of trying to run a lab and trying to train students and finding funding.”
On encouraging future scientists: “I would like to see students become excited or at least be exposed to science and to give science a chance. I think children have a natural wonder about nature and the universe. Sometimes I’ll talk to kindergarten classes and I’ll take a microscope and some slides and they would sit there all day long.”
