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 UCSF's
Frank McCormick: Cold Calculation on Cancer
Most research scientists consider themselves
fortunate if they manage one fruitful career in the course of a lifetime. At last count,
Frank McCormick was on his fourth. His early work was on DNA tumor viruses and led him to
some of the earliest studies on the p53 tumor suppressor. In the 1980s, he moved into
signal transduction and the molecular basis of cancer and helped elucidate the control
mechanisms of ras, the most frequently activated human oncogene, which plays a
causal role in some 30% of all human cancers. McCormick's third incarnation, which has him
in the news lately, is as the founder of Onyx Pharmaceuticals and creator of a promising
technique to harness mutant cold viruses to attack tumors. Finally, last year, McCormick
was lured back to academia by the University of California at San Francisco, which
appointed him director of the new UCSF Cancer ... |
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