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Nurse-Researcher at University of Pennsylvania Wins $500,000 'Genius' Grant

Posted on: Monday, 6 October 2003, 06:00 CDT

Oct. 5--An expert on aging and cancer at the University of Pennsylvania has been awarded a $500,000, no-strings-attached grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Sarah Kagan, a gerontology clinical nurse specialist who has devoted her career to studying the special needs of elderly cancer patients, was one of 24 scientists, artists, writers and advocates given the "genius" award. She will receive the money over five years.

Award recipients are chosen on the basis of the originality and creativity of their work, according to the foundation.

The new MacArthur fellows were told of their selection last week, but the list was not made public until today. They were nominated and chosen through a secret process. There is no way to apply for the awards, and nominees are not interviewed by the foundation.

As a result, the phone call from the foundation came as shock. "I'm mystified. I'm dumbfounded," Kagan said. Receiving the award, she said, was a "weird combination of Queen for a Day and all sorts of things I can't put into words."

She has not yet decided how to use the money, which won't begin flowing until January. Up to now, she said, her typical grants have been for $10,000 to $15,000. She was already planning to take next year off to write an ambitious, general-audience book on "aging and cancer, from a societal basis."

Kagan, 41, who has a doctorate from the University of California, San Francisco, works as a nurse at Penn's Abramson Cancer Center and as an associate professor at the School of Nursing. She cares for patients, conducts research and teaches.

In part, she hopes her award will bring more attention to the role that nurse-scholars play in medicine.

Most people who get cancer are older than 65, and they bring a lifetime of experiences to their diagnosis that affect their response to it, she said. "These extra decades tend to add complexity and detail," she said, and patients will get better care if their doctors and nurses understand that.

Doctors often give older patients lower doses of radiation and chemotherapy than younger patients in the paternalistic belief that they couldn't handle more, Kagan said. All that does, she said, is expose older people to the side effects of the treatments without treating their cancer well. In fact, research increasingly is showing that older patients can take the higher doses.

This year's other MacArthur Fellows are: Guillermo Algaze, 48, anthropology professor, University of California, San Diego; James J. Collins, 38, biomedical engineering professor, Boston University; Lydia Davis, 56, short-story writer and professor at State University of New York, Albany; Erik Demaine, 22, computer science professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Corinne Dufka, 46, consultant researcher with Human Rights Watch, Freetown, Sierra Leone; Peter Gleick, 46, cofounder and president, Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, Oakland, Calif.; Osvaldo Golijov, 42, music professor at College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Mass.; Deborah Jin, 34, physicist at JILA, Boulder, Colo.; Angela Johnson, 42, children's novelist and poet, Kent, Ohio; Tom Joyce, 46, blacksmith and artist, Santa Fe, N.M.; Ned Kahn, 43, science exhibit artist, Sebastopol, Calif.; Jim Yong Kim, 43, public-health physician, World Health Organization, Geneva; Nawal Nour, physician and founder/director of the African Women's Health Practice, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston; Loren Rieseberg, 42, director, plant sciences program, Indiana University, Bloomington; Amy Rosenzweig, 36, professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.; Pedro A. Sanchez, 62, director of tropical agriculture, Earth Institute, Columbia University; Lateefah Simon, 26, executive director, Center for Young Women's Development, San Francisco; Peter Sis, 54, illustrator, New York City; Sarah Sze, 34, sculptor, New York City; Eve Troutt Powell, 42, history professor, University of Georgia, Athens; Anders Winroth, 38, medieval history professor, Yale University; Daisy Youngblood, 58, ceramicist, Santa Fe., N.M., and Xiaowei Zhuang, 31, chemistry and chemical biology professor, Harvard University.

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