First person profile: Norman E. "Ned" Sharpless, MD: As director of the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Sharpless has turned a passion for research into a lifelong career.

Abstract

Norman E. “Ned” Sharpless, MD, the 15th director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), says that it was his parents' choice of professions—a pediatrician and a pathologist—that first allowed him to see what a rewarding and vibrant career medicine could be. “Very quickly, I found that I loved medical school; I really enjoyed the didactic and academic aspects of it. I enjoyed learning physiology and pathology,” he says. “But the part of medical school in the third year, when you actually get to go and see patients—I enjoyed that even more. It worked out to be a great choice for me. It really fit my interests and passions.” His passion for research was sparked during a year off from medical school while he was working in a laboratory at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) with a focus on virology. This period represented one of his most important career development experiences as he learned the ins and outs of running a laboratory through observation. “Although my time at the laboratory originally stemmed from going into my second year of medical school lacking a clear plan, it turned out to be one of the best years of my life,” he says. He completed his hematology/oncology fellowship at Dana-Farber/Partners CancerCare, both of Harvard Medical School, and later served on the faculty there for 2 years. He joined the UNC School of Medicine faculty in the Departments of Medicine and Genetics in 2002 and was appointed the Wellcome Distinguished Professor in Cancer Research in 2012. In 2014, Dr. Sharpless began as director of the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center at UNC. He was sworn in as director of the NCI in October of 2017. Dr. Sharpless is a member of the Association of American Physicians and the American Society for Clinical Investigation and he is a Fellow of the Academy of the American Association for Cancer Research. During his career, he has authored more than 160 original scientific papers, reviews, and book chapters, and he is an inventor on 10 patents. Dr. Sharpless is currently in his fifth year as the director of the NCI, to which he returned after serving a 7-month term as Acting Commissioner of Food and Drugs at the Food and Drug Administration. His time there was “a tremendous privilege,” he says, adding that it was his late father's service in the army during World War II that helped to inspire his work there. “It got me thinking, what had I done for my country? There was this thing missing—I needed to give back to my country as well, because I share my father's belief in what a great nation this is. I really enjoyed working there; I learned a lot and I'm proud of what we got done.” This included addressing administrative challenges during a hiring crisis and continuing progress on important public health issues, such as the ban on flavored cartridge-based e-cigarettes. “You can't look at just one variable like race or socioeconomic status. These factors all work together in concert in an individual patient to influence how they experience cancer.” —Norman E. “Ned” Sharpless, MD This year celebrates the 50th anniversary of the National Cancer Act, which was signed into action by President Nixon in 1971.3 The Act was an amendment to the Public Health Service Act of 1944 and represented a commitment to fighting cancer, which had become the nation's second leading cause of death by 1970. Dr. Sharpless says that although the act was visionary in creating an infrastructure for cancer research at that time, it was also naïve because a cure for cancer was expected just 5 years later. “Back then, we didn't really know what we didn't know,” he says. “We didn't have a sufficient biologic understanding of cancer to know what a difficult problem it is to solve.” With cancer still among the leading causes of death for Americans,4 Dr. Sharpless notes that it remains a national health concern. (As of Nov. 4, 2021, lung cancer was the leading cause of cancer death in the United States, accounting for nearly 140,000 deaths in the year 2019.4) “There's a real urgency to continue to make progress for our patients.”