I mostly write this blog for fun, but today I have something important to share.
To the extent that I am a good researcher, I owe a tremendous debt to Randy Pausch. Randy advised my PhD studies at the University of Virginia. Randy is a great guy, always brimming with humor and enthusiasm. Randy is now a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He is 47 years old, has a beautiful wife, and they have three children ranging from 2 to 6 years old.
Randy will die soon.
Randy has pancreatic cancer. Randy is doing everything possible to raise awareness while he still can. Time is short. As Randy says, "We don't have a Michael J. Foxx because people die too fast." Randy recently gave absolutely riveting testimony before Congress (YouTube video) to help raise research funding for pancreatic cancer. Join in and help us fight the good fight by donating to the Lustgarten foundation, and the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN).
As Randy summarized his situation in the video, "I've metastasized to my liver and spleen, which means there's a 100% chance that I will be dying."
Randy tells it like it is. He has always been known for this. I've heard people say that he has no tact. But typically this was said by people who didn't like being told how it is. It's a pity because the only way to better yourself is to listen to constructive criticism from smart people around you. And the most constructive criticism is that which is brutally honest.
Pancreatic cancer is absolutely lethal. A friend of my family saw his father diagnosed with pancreatic cancer; the man was dead six weeks later. Median survival from diagnosis is 3 to 6 months. Seventy-five percent of patients are dead by one year. 5-year survival is 4%.
And, as Randy noted in his testimony to Congress "It is one of the only cancers you can point to and say, in the last 30 years, we've made no progress." That is shameful.
It's been given up as too hard. But Randy has an answer to that too.
"I don't believe in too hard."
Back in my graduate days of working with Randy, whenever someone was stuck and said they couldn't figure out a problem, or that they didn't think something would work, Randy would never accept that kind of answer. "That's proof by I'm not smart enough," he would say. Randy was serving notice: that was not going to cut it in these parts.
This gets to gist of why pancreatic cancer research needs serious governmental support. And it needs your help too.
In the research game, you learn the most by going after the hardest problems. That's where the big breakthroughs that have ripple effects throughout an entire discipline happen. You solve the hardest part first because that gives the most fundamental insights.
Let's not let pancreatic cancer fall on the floor by way of "We're not smart enough."
In his congressional testimony, Randy further laid out the case:
By funding pancreatic cancer research, we will be going after the hardest problem. If you go after the hardest problem, you can't go for the halfway solutions.
The trick is to seed the junior hotshots... this is going to be cracked by somebody younger... it's gonna have to be a breakthrough. They [the hotshot young researchers] need the strong sense that the funding is there. The smart people work on what there's money to work on.
Let's empower the best and brightest in the research community to set their teeth into this problem. But they need the dollars to make it happen. It won't come in time to help Randy, but it might come in time to help his children: research shows there's a genetic link to pancreatic cancer. Let your lawmakers know this is important. Donate to the Lustgarten foundation and the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN). I'll be donating a dollar for every InkSeine download this year, up to the maximum Microsoft matching contribution - so that will double the dollars.
The Last Lecture: How did Randy come to be delivering testimony to Congress?
Well, in the last six months Randy has become an "accidental celebrity." There's a tradition in academia of giving a "Last Lecture." Hypothetically, if you were going to die, what would you tell your students?
Randy got to do it for real. He has a reputation for being a great speaker, and he didn't disappoint.
Randy's last lecture was entitled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams." Although hundreds of people attended, this is really a lecture that was delivered for three persons; Randy says "I was trying to put myself in a bottle that would one day wash up on a beach for my children." But six million people ended up watching the last lecture online. He's given a condensed version of it on Oprah. His story will be featured in a one-hour interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC this week ("the last lecture, a love story for your life," Wednesday April 9th, 10 pm / 9 central).
But what I'm most eagerly awaiting is the publication of his book "The Last Lecture," which will be published on Tuesday, April 8.
Of course, Randy's main motivation for writing this book is again for his children. All he cares about are the first three copies. But Randy shared so many nuggets of wisdom with me over the years that I really look forward to savoring his gift of a few more. I remember Randy saying once in his early bachelor days that "I don't plan to have kids, but my students are my children..." and I think that is perhaps more true than he ever realized.
Resources: