Award-winning oncologist and researcher Dr. Frank L. Meyskens Jr. has been a force behind the College of Health Sciences since it was but a gleam in the eyes of UC Irvine faculty and administrators in June 2003.
These days, as Associate Vice Chancellor of Health Sciences, Meyskens oversees the fast-growing programs in Nursing Science and Public Health and the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences on the UC Irvine campus. He also juggles duties as director of the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at UC Irvine Medical Center in Orange.
When he’s not wearing those administrative hats, Meyskens is seeing cancer patients and leading clinical research efforts, including the 2008 discovery of a drug combination that may help prevent colon cancer. Let’s not forget his mentoring of dozens of post-doctoral researchers and clinicians.
It all makes for work weeks that regularly exceed 75 hours. Not that he’s complaining.
"I don’t consider this work," Meyskens said. "I am a very lucky man."
Since his arrival at UC Irvine in 1989, Meyskens has helped the university become one of the top U.S. centers for cancer treatment and research, especially in the areas of prevention and early diagnosis. He helped found the cancer center, which in 1997 became Orange County’s only National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated comprehensive cancer center, one of only 39 in the country. Six years later, it was one of only six institutions nationwide selected by the NCI to conduct tests on cancer prevention drugs.
Under Meyskens, the number of biologists, engineers, oncologists and other faculty researching cancer treatment and prevention has doubled to about 200. Grant dollars have more than quadrupled and the total number of patients has increased considerably.
In 2006, Meyskens was awarded UC Irvine’s Daniel G. Aldrich Jr. Endowed Chair, named for the campus’ founding chancellor to honor and support the research of a faculty member of the highest distinction. That year, Meyskens also received the American Society of Preventive Oncology’s Distinguished Achievement Award for three decades of work.
Meyskens says he became fascinated by science and medicine as a child after spending a good deal of time in hospitals because of seizures. The son of a plumber, he became the first in his working-class family to graduate from college, thanks to a full scholarship from the University of San Francisco. He went on to study medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and began to focus on cancer during a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health.
Today, Meyskens lectures around the world and serves on the editorial boards of several peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. He also is a founding member of the International Society of Cancer Prevention, serving as its president from 1999 to 2004, and an active member of many professional organizations, including the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Association for Cancer Research.
Not surprisingly, Meyskens is the author of hundreds of research articles and book chapters. But the writing closest to his heart is poetry, for which he sets aside Sunday mornings in his easy chair well away from ringing telephones and e-mails.
"I start early in the morning and go until I get tired, usually four or five hours," he says. "I find it emotionally satisfying."
It’s an outlet for a physician who so often works with terminally ill patients. "Ripped," the opening poem in his 2007 collection, "Aching for Tomorrow," is the story of a young mother whose 2001 death somehow penetrated the "Kevlar bullet-proof vest" budding doctors are trained to wear.
No caregiver is really immune, he seems to say in "Relapse," a poem about a patient who is stunned to learn that her cancer has returned.
"And my wet eyes / were not for you but for me, / wondering if I had somehow lost my calling. / The crushing in my chest told me it wasn’t so."