Pedal the Cause

It was a snowy January afternoon in Albany, New York. I was at the NY Department of Health, collecting data for my Masters thesis. One tends to treat data as just that, data. The fact that each entry represented a life lost was easy to compartmentalize as I had already gone through geocoding thousands of deaths from Leukemia and Lymphoma.

Then I saw Rick's name.

We were friends in High School just six years earlier. I knew he had been diagnosed with Leukemia but had lost touch with him and didn't know he had died. Seeing his name was a jolt. I had come here to assist the DoH with cleaning up their data in exchange for using it to demonstrate a new statistical method for ranking cancer assessments. My work would be presented to the Centers for Disease Control and published in a prestigious journal. Career opportunities would follow. But on that day, I realized it wasn't all about me. It would matter to real people who I would probably never meet, but real people all the same.

In the nearly 40 years since, I've done a lot of work that I'm proud of, but I still think of that effort as probably the most impactful thing I'll ever do. It allowed the state to prioritize investigations into environmental causes and, in at least one instance, led to cleaning up a contaminated water supply that might have gone unnoticed. Statistical techniques have moved on and my method is now just an occasional footnote in literature reviews, but it saved real lives at the time.

Pedal the Cause raises money to keep cancer research moving forward. At a time when government funding (my research was funded by the National Institutes of Health) is being severely cut, this is more important than ever. Cancer research is expensive. Scientific discovery is, almost by definition, "inefficient". Some ideas work out; some don't. But the search matters greatly. Please join me in supporting the work being done at the Siteman Center to save lives not just today, but provide better treatments tomorrow.