A 50 year perspective on endocrine neoplasia: clinic to genes and back

Having completed medical school and internship in 1947 when effective therapeutic interventions were quite limited (mostly to surgery), I became impressed with the importance of diagnosing the then known treatable diseases. As a young army medical officer, I was exposed to those who emphasized pheochromocytomas and parathyroid adenomas as treatable conditions. After completing internal medicine training, I continued my search for these conditions but it was not until 1958 that I first encountered my first patient with hyperparathyroidism (HPT) who happened to be in a family with many others affected. After leaving the small clinic in Indiana where I practiced for 19 years, in 1970 I came to Henry Ford Hospital where I continued my search for hereditary HPT and encountered families of MEN-2 by applying calcitonin studies to the families of our cases of medullary thyroid cancer. Early genetic linkage studies suggested that progress in the field would benefit from a workshop on MEN-2 and Nancy Simpson agreed to host the first workshop in Kingston in 1984. This and the five subsequent workshops brought together those interested in the field and resulted in the remarkable advances being made in the diagnosis and treatment of endocrine neoplasias and in the understanding of these conditions and of neoplasia in general.