The Long Walk to Biological Wholism

My Father’s Culminating Diet-Disease Research Study in China

My father’s research career began with a search for the one, all-important mechanism of action involved in cancer, motivated by the idea he could study the impact of animal protein on that one factor and know all that was necessary to know about nutrition and cancer. He quickly discovered, though, that there is no such thing as one key mechanistic factor, and when he understood this, he and his graduate students raced along the cancer causation continuum, quickly moving past initiation and into the promotion phase of cancer. Their findings on the role of animal protein all along this continuum were nothing short of astounding.

The question he had by 1980, toward the tail end of this journey, was simple—could this relationship between animal protein and cancer be seen and confirmed in a human population? Once again, my father’s life took a fortuitous turn, this time when a senior researcher from China, Dr. Chen Junshi, joined my father for a sabbatical study in his lab at Cornell.