CARL H. JUNE
Director of Translational Research,
Abramson Cancer Center
Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine Perelman School of Medicine,
University of PennsylvaniaCOURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIAIn 1971, as Carl June geared up to graduate from his San Francisco Bay–area high school, the Vietnam War raged on. He had been accepted to Stanford University, Caltech, and others, but with the risk of being drafted into the already decade-long war, June opted to attend the United States Naval Academy (USNA) in Annapolis, Maryland, “with the rationale that it would make me an officer, rather than going in as an enlisted person into the rice paddies,” he says.
A year earlier, the school had launched its premed program. With a knack for biology, June jumped on the opportunity, joining 15 others in the second USNA premed class. More good fortune struck when the U.S. pulled its troops out of Vietnam in 1973, “so when I graduated there was no longer a war, which I was happy about,” June recalls. Rather than sending him overseas, the Navy gave June a full ride to medical school at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, where he completed the required coursework in three years. He then jetted off to Geneva, Switzerland, to join a lab conducting research on malaria vaccines at the World Health Organization for the fourth year of his scholarship. “My last year [of med ...
