Susan Desmond-Hellmann
speaker
362 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Susan Desmond-Hellmann’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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With cancer, the mentor I was supposed to work with ended up not coming to San Francisco. So I decided to go to Berkeley and get a master's in public health as a backup strategy. I really scrambled because I didn't want to waste a year.
It's a very academic place, but you could do two or three years. And many people went into the lab. I didn't want to go into the lab. I wanted to do epidemiology. I wanted to learn more about statistics and epidemiology. I thought I wanted to do it because I wanted to be a cancer epidemiologist. And to this day, I still think that is one of the great
opportunities to make a big impact, but you have to be funded. So I'm a pragmatist. The good news was that all that learning at Berkeley and at UCSF in epi and biostat, I brought to drug development. Clinical trials have a lot in common with doing epidemiology.
It was, yeah. Palmer Beasley, one of the fathers of that relationship, was the guy who was supposed to come. There were preliminary papers and something relatively early, but it was emerging science.
You know, I don't. If you weren't in Asia, it was actually, I think, relatively low, but I believe increasing, which is partly why the vaccines are so important.
After I got my master's in public health, I became the oncologist at UCSF in the university hospital for the AIDS clinic.
This is Moffitt. So San Francisco General had a very well-known program run by oncologists for AIDS patients who were in the safety net hospital. But in the university hospital, if you were very sick and you had Kaposi's sarcoma, you saw me. And my husband, because we had just gotten married, we were interns together. He was in the lab in ID doing immunology work.
So two of the chiefs of medicine at UCSF were approached by the Rockefeller Foundation, who had started to become worried about heterosexual transmission of HIV. Remember, I talked about the Haitians and the hemophiliacs and homosexuals. 1H wasn't heterosexual. And so there was a lot of disbelief about African HIV.
And in fact, some people thought it must be gay sex, but people are too embarrassed to admit it. There were other theories, but people just did not understand what was going on in Africa. So the Rockefellers said, we'll give you a grant at UCSF. We'll grant you money to study heterosexual transmission of HIV.
Not going to the lab, but really looking at epi. And particularly, there was a hypothesis that if it was heterosexually transmitted, there was something to do with sexually transmitted diseases. And that there was something about increasing your risk if you had untreated STDs, sexually transmitted diseases. So we were asked to go. UCSF had no global health.
To put this into context, we had a flat and two Honda Civics. I still remember this. We gave my dad power of attorney. We sublet our flat and we sold our Hondas and moved to Uganda. I'm laughing in part because I had never been east of Chicago. I mean, this was a pretty dramatic thing to do.
The two of us. That's the team.
That's the team. And Uganda was a place where, on the positive side of things, the NCI had set up a collaboration with Uganda Cancer Institute, where they did some really great things in lymphoma and Burkitt's lymphoma, if you remember those stories. And one of the physicians at UCSF had been associated with that, John Ziegler. So there was a connection to the Uganda Cancer Institute.
So on the good side of things, there was that. And there also was and is the Entebbe Viral Institute. So there was some infrastructure there. Unfortunately, most of that infrastructure had been ruined by the Idi Amin regime not long before we went to Uganda. So when we went there, it was pretty lawless. There were roadblocks you had to stop at. It was difficult to live there.
It was really difficult.
I would say now that I'm used to being in more safe situations and older and wiser, it was probably not that smart the way we lived there. But we weren't reckless. It seemed dangerous when you were in the car to have carjacking or your money go missing or things like that.
He was gone. But when we were there, he made that attempt to come back from Saudi Arabia and go back to Uganda. But it was thwarted. So that was good news. So Nick, my husband, reestablished the sexually transmitted disease clinic and attended in the internal medicine ward. And I like to say I doubled the population of oncologists in Uganda when I was there.
So, my colleague, Edward Mbidi, who's Ugandan, put all his focus on the pediatric unit, and I put all my focus on the adult unit, which was so many cases of Kaposi's sarcoma.
This is 89, 90, and 91.
Not yet.
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