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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