A life behind life science

Noreen O'Neill, who died of melanoma in July, 2000. Credit: Courtesy of the O'Neill family" />Noreen O'Neill, who died of melanoma in July, 2000. Credit: Courtesy of the O'Neill family Meenhard Herlyn studied melanoma for 20 years before he ever met a single patient with the disease. He has published more than 380 papers on melanoma and other cancers, in which he discovered monoclonal antibod

Written byBob Grant

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Meenhard Herlyn studied melanoma for 20 years before he ever met a single patient with the disease. He has published more than 380 papers on melanoma and other cancers, in which he discovered monoclonal antibodies to tumor cells that are still used to diagnose some types of cancer, characterized stages in melanoma's progression, and identified genes that play key roles in that progression.

Then, on a spring morning in 1998, Herlyn met Noreen O'Neill and her sister Kate in a conference room at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. Noreen had been diagnosed with melanoma three years earlier, and she and the scientist hit it off right away. "In the first fifteen minutes there was no question that they would be working together," Kate remembers. Herlyn admits that he was instantly taken with Noreen. "She was a very beautiful person, and very radiant, and very outgoing, and very personable," he says.

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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