Perseverance: True Voices of Cancer Survivors by Carolyn Rubenstein（2009）

In general cancers are among diseases for old people. However, many young
people including children also suffer from some cancers such as leukemia
and glioma as well as NF and TSC tumors.

Like Lans Armstrong, the famous cyclist who overcame his formidable cancer
and won Tour de France seven times in row, so many other youngsters overcome
their cancers in their own way, and keep pursing their career. Carolyn Rubenstein
(24), a Ph.D. student at Harvard, published recently her inspiring story
about these 20 young brave and lucky cancer survivors who overcome their
fear caused by their life-threatening cancers in their childhood.

Anti-cancer drugs work only when cancer patients fight against this fear,
with a "positive" thinking. After all, there are a few endogenous anti-cancer
signal substances in our brain which are activated only when our mind looks
forward to the survival. Carolyn, who is currently studying clinical psychology,
has learned such an endogenous healing power, since she established a non-profit
organization "CCC" to support children with cancers, a decade ago.

Reading through this book, I hope every cancer patient, young or old, will
get both courage and energy for surviving his or her own cancer.

This book reminds me of at least two old friends of mine. One is my old German
Ph.D student who also overcame his leukemia a few decades ago, and is now
working in Sweden as a senior biomedical scientist. The other is Tom, a
professor at Yale as well as a Boston Marathorner and mountain climber,
who used to work at NIH for a few years in early 1970s, and found a "cofactor"
of a mysterious single-headed myosin from a soil amoeba. A year after he
returned to Harvard Med School, I started unveiling the very identity of
this cofactor which turned out to be a kinase which phosphorylates the heavy
chain of this myosin. Later this kinase was called "PAK". PAK is essential
for the growth of more than 70% of all human cancers as well as NF and TSC
tumors. Without his discovery of this amoeba cofactor, the advance in our
R and D of anti-cancer=anti-PAK drugs would have been significantly delayed.

Back to mid-1980s, Tom was suddenly found to suffer from a deadly cancer.
However, he was firmly determined to fight back with this cancer, and by
early summer of 1988, he was fully recovered from the cancer, and challenged
successfully the Himalayas with his wife and their children together, which
had been their life-long dream. For this special reason, I am planning to
publish my Japanese translation of this inspiring book with his family photo
in the Himalayas as a cover, hopefully to share these great "fighting spirits"
with youngsters as well as oldsters in my home country.

The end of this month, a big change will be expected in Japanese politics.
The bloody conservative party, which has cancerously ruled the Japanese
government for five decades, will be defeated at the coming general election
(August 30), and Democrats will grab the very first chance of ruling our
government. Our "perseverance" is about to be paid off at last!