Abstract
The life of Greg Curt is recollected through personal and professional memories. He is remembered for a distinguished career, including the creation of Project Data Sphere, and for his diplomatic skills, bringing together government, industry partners, and academia to initiate collaborative trials.
My treasured friend and colleague for many years, Greg Curt, died of lung cancer on July 31st of 2016, an abrupt end to a life devoted to curing cancer. His impact on our field deserves our admiration and respect, and will be recounted below. His friendship and loyalty to his many colleagues in industry, government, and academia remind us of the strong personal ties that grow as we work together toward this common goal. Indeed, his life and work exemplify why financial reward, academic acclaim, and public fame are not the only, or even most important, rewards of a career in oncology. The greatest satisfaction and reward come from our personal relationships with our colleagues and our patients.
Greg grew up in Fall River, MA, and attended Providence College, where he discovered his aptitude for science and determined to enter medicine. After medical school at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, he performed superbly as a resident at the Deaconess Hospital in Boston and in his spare moments worked at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, learning the basics of cancer research in the laboratory. He then formally entered his chosen realm as a fellow in medical oncology at the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Medicine Branch, under the tutelage of this author, Bob Young, Vince De Vita, and Dan Longo. He proved to be a superb clinician and an able laboratory investigator.
I had the privilege of serving as his mentor in the laboratory, where he delved into the problem of drug resistance and authored the landmark paper in the New England Journal of Medicine describing amplification of dihydrofolate reductase in a small cell tumor treated with methotrexate, the first clinical description of gene amplification as a mechanism of drug resistance. As I got to know Greg, I realized that among his many gifts, he had an exceptional ability to work with others. He had all of the qualities one would value in a clinical program leader: sensitivity to ideas and to emotions, an ability to express empathy and support for colleagues, an incredible memory for details, and a devotion to patient care. Tellingly, he was equally admired by everyone in his chain of command, secretaries, fellows, nurses, doctors, and of course everyone he cared for as a physician. It made no difference to him; all were treated with respect, affection, and good humor.
After a brief sojourn to work with Paul Calabresi at the Brown University Cancer Center, he returned to NCI and from 1988 to 1995 served as Special Assistant and then Deputy Director of the Division of Cancer Treatment (DCT) at NCI, in my personal inner circle of colleagues, advisors, and friends. These were turbulent years, with DCT facing serious challenges in guiding drug development for cancer (Taxol and monoclonal antibodies) and AIDS (reverse transcriptase inhibitors). Greg’s unfailing sense of humor and unselfish devotion to the mission proved invaluable during those difficult but rewarding times. Most remarkable was his ability to remember every conversation, every casual remark, every nuance of interaction with the NCI leadership (Vince De Vita and Sam Broder), the DCT Board of Scientific Counselors (Paul Calabresi, Sam Hellman, and John Niederhuber), and the ever-present press (The Washington Post and the Cancer Letter). His ability to sense the humor and emotion of any situation was legendary, and the stories that resulted were never-ending. He could have written a very entertaining insider’s view of Bethesda, MD. He served as NCI’s Clinical Director from 1996 to 2002 under the leadership of Rick Klausner, and then with Rick’s departure, moved to industry.
His career at AstraZeneca did not hew to the usual industry track. His unique value to the company derived from his diplomatic skills and his ability to bring government, industry partners, and academia together to initiate collaborative trials, which now play such an important role in moving targeted therapies into new combinations. He had been a player in each of these arenas (government, industry, and academia) and had an unfailing sense of how to win the confidence and cooperation of his peers. These skills extended to his work with Mace Rothenberg, a friend from NCI days, and later of Pfizer. They led the effort to create Project Data Sphere® (PDS) by the Life Sciences Consortium of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer. With current data on more than 30,000 individual patients in its online archives, PDS is now the most successful of the many efforts to compile and make available data from cancer clinical trials conducted by industry, NCI, and academia. It has more than 1,300 daily users online.
Despite his commitments to his work, he managed to build a remarkable home life with his wife Suzanne, a busy lawyer of much repute in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, DC; his beautiful and so-smart daughter Katie; and his deputy dog, Perch, and parakeets, Polly and Pauline. He somehow found time to build his own harpsichords, on which he played Bach and Mozart, and devoted time to listening to his favorite operas.
How ironic that such a selfless and devoted servant to the cause of cancer eradication should succumb to the same dreaded illness, one of the increasing numbers of nonsmokers afflicted by non-small cell lung cancer. He would want us to honor him through our further work and devotion to the same task. Those of us who knew Greg as a colleague and friend loved him and will carry forward, with his life’s work as an inspiration and cherished memory.
