My name is Katherine Helming Walsh.
And my life was saved by biomedical research.
I'm here today to share my story with you in order to demonstrate that scientific research truly can impact our health in a very meaningful and personal way.
I was a PhD student here at Harvard Medical School in the biological and biomedical sciences program when I was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. I was 23 years old. I was immediately rushed to Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where I began an intensive two-year treatment regimen.
When I was diagnosed with leukemia, my world shifted in a radical and ironic way. I had just begun to fulfill my dream of advancing medical knowledge, specifically in the field of cancer biology. I was so excited to be conducting cutting-edge research and to be taking classes from world-class experts. Yet I went from being a busy graduate student researcher in one of Dana-Farber’s laboratories to being a very sick patient in one of the hospital rooms.
Thanks to an incredible team of doctors and nurses at Dana-Farber and Brigham and Women’s, my amazingly supportive network of family and friends and decades of dedicated biomedical research, I am here today, cancer-free and back in the laboratory, conducting the research that I originally set out to do, now with a renewed passion and vigor.
I would not be here today if it were not for the persistence, creativity and courage of the many scientists who came before all of us.
In sight of where we are standing right now, Dr. Sidney Farber conducted the very first trials with folate acid antagonists in the 1940s, which would become the basis for modern-day methotrexate, a drug that was a key component of the treatment regimen that saved my life. A diagnosis of acute lymphoblastic leukemia in a child was a death sentence before Dr. Farber’s work, and now nearly 90 percent of cases are curable.
My specific case was more challenging, because I was 23 when I was diagnosed, not a child. Despite the high cure rates for children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia seen by the 1990s, young adults diagnosed with this disease had significantly poorer outcomes, until a pair of scientists from the University of Chicago made discoveries that led to the development of a new chemotherapy treatment protocol. I was treated with this protocol and now I am more than six years into remission. My life was actually saved twice by innovative biomedical researchers working over a span of six decades!
Along my journey through treatment and into survivorship, I have had the great privilege of meeting many cancer patients. I am acutely aware that most of these individuals are not as fortunate as I am and are still waiting for that new drug, that clinical trial, the holy grail of the elusive cure. The lives of these incredibly brave people depend on our research, on our perseverance and on our passion for science.
I am dedicating my life to the study of biomedical science with the pursuit of advances in therapies and treatments for patients today. I know firsthand what it is like to be so very sick and reliant on these amazing therapies that have come out of labs just like the one I work in. The research that we do today builds on generations of previous work and will form the foundations for scientists of the future. My life is proof that together we can solve the most complicated and seemingly impossible medical puzzles. Together we can continue to make those discoveries that will transform the lives of people suffering from diseases today. There is so much more yet for us to learn, and so many diseases for which we do not yet have cures. If we are going to improve health in our country, we need to devote more resources to biomedical research—not cut back on research funding.
I feel that my story brings to life the theme of this rally: “Science is good for your health!”
Adapted from a speech delivered by Katherine Helming Walsh, a research scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, at the HMS March for Science rally on April 22, 2017.
