SALMON, Sydney (Syd)

The Arizona Daily Star, Tucson, Arizona October 7, 1999 Cancer researcher Sydney Salmon dies, was founder, ex-director of Arizona Cancer Center Dr. Sydney E. Salmon, founder of the Arizona Cancer Center and an internationally respected leader in the war on cancer, died yesterday, ending his own battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 63. Salmon's contributions to cancer research include the first successful cloning of human tumor cells and the discovery of a laboratory process to rapidly screen thousands of potential cancer-fighting drugs. He came to Tucson in 1972 with a vision for the first comprehensive cancer research center in the Southwest. He opened the Arizona Cancer Center four years later in a trailer on the north end of the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center. The center moved into its own building in 1980. In January 1998, the university dedicated an addition named for Salmon. He served as the center's director until mid-August, when he yielded the post to Dr. Daniel D. Von Hoff, to whom he taught the science of cancer-cell cloning more than 20 years ago. Von Hoff issued a statement yesterday morning calling Salmon 'a remarkable cancer visionary and a great leader.' Later in the day, Von Hoff said simply, 'I miss him.' Dr. David S. Alberts, director of cancer prevention and control at the Cancer Center and associate dean for research at the UA College of Medicine, became Salmon's oncologist after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December 1997. 'He was bigger than life. He gave so much intelligence to the universe, he will never be forgotten,' Alberts said yesterday. Dr. Frederick Ahmann, the Cancer Center's clinic director, called Salmon a brilliant scientist. 'But you know, there was not a bit of arrogance about him,' Ahmann said. 'And when you look at so many accomplished men and women, that's a trait that we wish more of them had. He was just an absolutely wonderful human being.' UA President Peter Likins noted 'the irony that the man who was responsible for saving so many lives in Arizona has been taken by the disease he fought with such vigor.' Salmon's death, Likins said, 'is a loss . . . to the world.' Salmon was an intensely private man who nonetheless went public with his cancer diagnosis, seeing an opportunity to drive home the point that cancer can strike anyone at any time. He noted that pancreatic cancer has one of the worst survival rates of any malignancy. Statistically, one could expect to die within four months of diagnosis. 'Cancer patients face an immediate future with a lot of uncertainty about what the outcome of treatment will be,' Salmon said in December 1997. 'At the very base is an understanding that statistics don't relate to the individual - only to large numbers of patients. 'My wife, Joanie, and my family and I have discussed this in detail, and feel we are about as ready for the immediate future as anyone can be.' Yesterday, nearly 22 months after Salmon became a cancer patient, colleagues here and around the country expressed their grief. 'As far as I am concerned, he was one of the leading medical oncologists of the last 20 years,' said Dr. Bernard Fisher of Pittsburgh, a leader in breast cancer research. 'Syd was a great teacher, a great physician, a great scientist and above all a great human being.' Jeffrey Trent, chief of the laboratory of cancer genetics at the National Center for Human Genome Research in Bethesda, Md., worked at the Arizona Cancer Center during the 1980s. 'Syd made major breakthroughs in our understanding of cancer, and he was on the cutting edge of new technology right up to the end of his life,' Trent said. On a personal level, Trent said, 'Syd liked people. He cared for people with really bad disease, and I never saw him give up hope for his patients.' Dr. Vincent DeVita, director of the Yale University Comprehensive Cancer Center and former director of the National Cancer Institute, remembered Salmon as a man of vision who dared to take controversial stands. 'On the big issues, he was always right there,' DeVita said yesterday. 'I had a good deal of respect for him.' Ardie Delforge, the Cancer Center's nursing manager, attended Salmon through nearly two years of cancer treatment. She remembered him yesterday as one who 'imparted so much of his knowledge and wisdom to us in such a genuinely kind way.' In the 1970s, Salmon developed a test for measuring the extent of cancer in patients with multiple myeloma, the bone-marrow cancer on which he focused much of his research. His technique for tumor-cell cloning enabled scientists for the first time to test multiple drugs for their effectiveness in fighting an individual patient's cancer. In the 1980s, he and Cancer Center colleague Kit Lam developed a process of rapidly analyzing peptide chains as potential cancer-fighting agents. Most recently, he was one of the first oncologists to recognize a new technique for identifying genes that are active or inactive in cancer cells. 'Just in the last two years, we've seen a downward trend in the death rate from cancer in this country,' Alberts said, 'and I think Syd had a lot to do with that. Basically, he raised the bar for science.' Salmon was born in Staten Island, N.Y., on May 8, 1936. His mother's rheumatoid arthritis brought the family to Tucson 12 years later. He attended Mansfeld Junior High School and graduated from Tucson High School in 1954. He received his bachelor's in philosophy, with a minor in psychology, from the UA in 1958. That June, he married Joan Tobias of Tucson, and that fall he entered medical school at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. After receiving his medical degree and completing his residency in Rochester, N.Y., he enlisted in the U.S. Public Health Service. He spent two years with the cancer research division of the service's hospital in Boston, then six years with the University of California, San Francisco. He came to the UA in 1972 as an associate professor of medicine and head of the College of Medicine's new section of hematology and oncology. In 1989, he was named a Regents Professor of Medicine. In 1984, he was named president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. In 1991, President George Bush appointed him to a five-year term on the National Cancer Advisory Board, which guides the research agenda of the National Cancer Institute. A memorial service will be held Oct. 17 at 10:30 a.m. in front of the main entrance to the Arizona Cancer Center, 1515 N. Campbell Ave. The family is asking that contributions be sent to the Sydney E. Salmon, M.D., Director's Endowment, made payable to the Arizona Cancer Center/UAF, 1515 N. Campbell Ave., P.O. Box 245013, Tucson 85724-5013.