It seems that cancer is a direct result to injury. If you smoke, you damage your lung tissue, and then lung cancer arises. If you drink, you damage your liver, and then liver cancer occurs.
Eva Vertes
When I was about 9 years old, I became very interested in the human body and diseases. In general, I was just curious about the world around me. I think that any sort of curiosity as a child is a good beginning to a career in science because science, at least to me, is a continuous exploration of the unknown.
It is becoming clear that many diseases - especially cancer - are highly complex and may respond better to a multi-drug approach which targets many different aspects of a disease process.
For so long, the mainstays of cancer treatment have been chemotherapy and radiation. They're toxic and primitive. We need to look at it in a rational way and say, how can we help the body heal itself?
My grandmother was a chemist. She worked at the Banting Institute in Toronto, and at 44 she died of stomach cancer. I never met my grandmother, but I carry on her name - her exact name, Eva Vertes - and I like to think I carry on her scientific passion, too.
I decided to take two years between finishing undergraduate and beginning medical school to devote fully to medical research. I knew that I wanted to go to medical school during undergraduate, but I was also eager to get a significant amount of research experience.
I don't want to say, 'I want to cure cancer.' It's such a grand thing. People have been trying for so long and we're not getting very far. But I do want to try to understand it better, and I want to make some forward movement.
Muscle is constantly being used - constantly being damaged. If every time we tore a muscle or every time we stretched a muscle or moved in a wrong way, cancer occurred - I mean, everybody would have cancer almost.
Prevention is a very important part of solving the problem of cancer.
