Profile of Ronald Levy

Abstract

Over the past 2 decades, a fresh wave of cancer therapies have changed the way that the disease is treated. Some of the newest therapies are not drugs but antibodies, which provoke the body's immune system into destroying and, hopefully, eliminating its own tumors. Ronald Levy, who helped develop and test the first US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved antibody against cancer for the treatment of lymphoma, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2008. His Inaugural Article, published in this issue of PNAS, reveals a subpopulation of lymphoma cells whose numbers at the time of diagnosis predict the severity and lethality of these tumors (1). Ronald Levy. Levy, 68, now a professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Oncology at Stanford University School of Medicine, was born in Carmel, CA, and moved to Palo Alto, CA, during high school. He attended Harvard University (Cambridge, MA) as an undergraduate and had his first exposure to research in Konrad Bloch's laboratory shortly before Bloch won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism. Levy worked on the biosynthesis of monounsaturated fatty acids by bacteria (2). After graduating from Harvard with a degree in biochemistry in 1963, Levy enrolled in medical school at Stanford University. Then, Stanford had a 5-year curriculum that gave students extra time to pursue their own interests. These free periods were important formative events for Levy, which he used to work in the laboratory of another Nobel Prize winner, Arthur Kornberg, and in the laboratories of other Stanford scientists. Two more scientists were strong role models for Levy as a budding physician-scientist. The first, Henry Kaplan, founded the field of modern radiotherapy by using a linear accelerator to treat Hodgkin's lymphoma, which is now …