Brad Kahl: My Personal Interest in Lymphoma

Sometimes people ask me why I chose medicine and why I choose cancer specifically, my father had chronic myologic leukemia when I was a child and he died when I was 12 years old, and let me just say I know what it feels like if you're a family member of someone who's suffering, I know what it feels like. I want to make a difference, I want to help other people, you know there were things that couldn't be done for my Dad back then, and when you look at the disease he had its amazing what has happened in the last 30 years. When he died in 1979 he had an incurable cancer, and within several years of his death they were curing people with his kind of cancer with bone marrow transplantation, and nowadays people with that kind of cancer can just take a pill, they take a pill a day and it puts their disease in remission, and for most of those patients it stays in remission. So there's a wonderful example of how a disease has moved light years forward in 30 years, and we can do that in other cancers, and I want to do that in lymphoma.