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What first attracted you to a career in the field of cancer? Well, there were several reasons, the first was when I was a young surgical house doctor, we did a post-operative ward round in an old style Florence Nightingale type ward, we went around and the surgeon stopped at everybody and told them what he found at the operation and how well it went, it became obvious that he ignored and bypassed three patients completely. I asked the registrar why he wouldn't talk to them when they were terribly worried and anxious to talk to him. He said that at the operation he found they had cancer and he thinks he can't do anymore and so there's no point telling them. I thought there's a real career opportunity here. The second thing was when I did a medical house job, which had an oncology interest, I found that dealing with young patients with Hodgkin's disease and testicular cancer, it was really interesting the way the treatment was really starting to transform and cure some of these patients. I suppose they are the two main reasons that really got me interested.
What made you decide to focus on cancer immunotherapy specifically? I did all my registrar and senior registrar jobs in Australia, and started focusing on oncology and I became very interested in several things which led to the immunology aspect. The first thing was that in Australia I was told that everybody who died of liver cancer was an alcoholic. I noticed that there had been a link with the Australian antigen with Hepatitis, which turned out to be associated with the Hepatitis B virus as it came to be known, and that this was associated with chronic hepatitis, cirrhosis and then tumor development, and so I was very suspicious of this. When I was working in Sydney, a test for this virus became available for research purposes and I said I would be very interested to test all the patients who had been diagnosed as having died of liver cancer in the last 5 or 6 years. I then gathered all their serum samples together and we tested them. We found they were all Hepatitis B positive and that this fitted in...