STEPHEN B. BAYLIN
Professor of Oncology and Medicine
Deputy Director, Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive
Cancer Center
Johns Hopkins University School of MedicineCOURTESY OF JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICINEStephen Baylin always thought he would be a practicing physician. “But I started doing research in high school,” he says. “And over the years it just gradually took over my life.” That early work, which continued to draw Baylin into the lab during his undergraduate years at Duke University, “was a family affair: my father was in on the project, too. So we had lots of talks over the dinner table—and for years after.”
Although Baylin went on to obtain a medical degree from Duke, he never forgot the excitement of doing science. “I enjoyed seeing patients, but it seemed like you had a sort of rote way you had to respond to their problems in terms of the knowledge you could bring to them,” he says. “What was compelling to me was: What else do we need to know? What could we be doing differently?”
As an investigator at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Baylin began to address those questions, studying the genetic underpinnings of an inherited form of thyroid cancer. “My research started out very clinically related, but over the years it became more and more basic,” he says. ...
