Contributors

A seasoned hiker and skier who has visited most of the US National Parks, Keith Flaherty is no stranger to unfamiliar terrain. He entered college around the time of the molecular biology revolution in the early 1980s, and the new science entranced him. “It stuck with me as being an intriguing and fascinating level at which to try to understand human biology,” he says. In medical school he started to “think about patients and diseases in a molecular way.” That’s what attracted him to oncology, and, in particular, to finding cellular targets for curing the disease. Understanding cancer at that level was rather unexplored territory, and he has continued pushing into the blank spots on the map as the director of Development Therapeutics at Massachusetts General Hospital. “There is no area that I don’t find interesting…It’s what gets me out of bed in the morning,” he says. Flaherty discusses recent ...