Frank Mahoney, PhD, 2005 Honorary Member
By Paul Wallner, DO, FASTRO, and Colleen Lawton, MD, FASTRO
Paul Wallner: Good afternoon. On behalf of the ASTRO History Committee and my committee colleague, Dr. Colleen Lawton, I want to thank Dr. Mahoney for agreeing to sit for this interview. Dr. Mahoney was a long-time senior leader of the NCI’s Radiation Research Program, and a recipient of ASTRO Honorary Membership in 2005. Your biographical sketch indicates that you were born in Boston. Was it in the city Proper? That's a suburb of Boston, isn't it?
Frank Mahoney: Yes. It was in Roxbury, one of a dozen or so neighborhoods in the city. I'm the youngest of eight children, two girls and six boys. My oldest sibling, Elizabeth, is 17 years older than me. Our mother’s maiden name is Mahoney. I got interested in genealogy in order to find out what degree of cousin of myself I was. My parents were immigrants. They were born and raised 20 miles apart in Ireland, in County Cork. But they never met until they got to Boston. I’ve become a fan of a program on PBS TV called Finding Your Roots, hosted by Henry Louis Gates, a Harvard professor. He has two guests in each one hour episode, wherein he delves into their genealogy. From watching Gates' program, I’ve learned that parents often never tell their children much about their ancestry. It’s amazing how ignorant many of us are about it. My parents rarely talked much about ours. But in my genealogical pursuits, I've gotten back to Ireland a number of times. The place where my father was born is still in the extended family and now occupied by a first cousin, once removed. I pause here remembering that I collect pithy sayings. One of my favorites is: “My memory is getting bad. There are three things I have trouble remembering. One is faces and the other is names. The third one is – I forgot.”
Paul Wallner: Do you know when your parents came to this country?
Frank Mahoney: Yes, before the First World War, 1911 and 1913. My mother was one of eight. My father was one of 11. He was sort of in the middle of the family in birth order. He was trained as a blacksmith and practiced the trade up until the end of the Second World War. Initially, he worked in various shops around town. Luckily, just before the market crashed in 1929, he got a permanent job with the City of Boston. So, during the Depression, though not very much, there was money coming in every week which relieved a lot of anxiety.
Paul Wallner: Just out of curiosity, what did the City of Boston do with blacksmiths?
Frank Mahoney: Well, up until the end of WWII, they had lots of horses. After that he worked on things like beat up snowplows. Anyway, they had eight kids in my family. I was the youngest. The oldest was sister Elizabeth and she was 17 years older than me. She married an Italian guy which –
Paul Wallner: Was that a problem?
Frank Mahoney: Well, when my father was told about her plans, he was not overjoyed especially since the runner-up for her hand was another Mahoney, I guess so we could keep up our incestuous marriages. Anyway, when my father expressed dissatisfaction upon being told she was going to marry an Italian, one of her brothers said that, at least he's a Catholic. Dad replied that he's not a Catholic, he's a Mediterranean Catholic. Those Spanish and Italians, they think the Ten Commandments are advisory. But this Italian turned out to be a real winner. And my father learned to love him like another son. He also became sort of my second father. Being the youngest in the family and with my parents in their 40s when I was born and my oldest sister marrying when I was 5 years old, some funny relationship developed. It is often said that in families, people cluster in triplets. You know, you're closer to the one above you and the one below you. I have no one below me, being the youngest, and the one ahead of me is my brother, John. So we were quite close.
Paul Wallner: What was it like growing up in a family with seven siblings?
Frank Mahoney: Well, let me finish my thought. My parents were like grandparents. My oldest sister and her husband were like parents and their kids were like siblings. They didn't live too far away. My siblings, except for the brother right ahead of me, were like uncles and aunts. I was born in 1936 in the depths of the Depression and life expectancy at that time was 62 years. As it turned out, I got lucky. I spent my life in the best place in the world at the best time in human history. As I was telling Paul, I don't envy my grandchildren. They are likely to be around for the rest of the 21st century. There are many very scary scenarios possible in that time.
Paul Wallner: Tell us a little bit about your schooling – about elementary, high school, then college?
Frank Mahoney: I went to Catholic schools. Eight years of nuns and eight years of Jesuits.
Paul Wallner: Did you behave yourself or did you get your knuckles rapped?
Frank Mahoney: Not too often. I was sneaky smart most of the time. Only one or two nuns figured me out. The others I was able to hoodwink. After elementary school, I won a scholarship to Boston College High School. That is the high school branch of Boston College. I went to Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass. It's west of Boston, 40 miles or so. I went into physics because I liked math and my brother, John, was in engineering at the time. Holy Cross, a Jesuit institution, was almost like a seminary in those days. All males. No females allowed on campus except on rare occasions. And mass every day at 7:00 a.m., except Sunday.
Worcester is much colder and much snowier than Boston, especially much snowier. It is on the north side of Mt. St. James, called “the hill with pleasant springs.” For years, I thought that meant water running out of the ground, but in fact it refers to the season of the year. Springtime is glorious for a number of reasons. The major one is that winter is over. So, anyway, I got a physics degree in 1957.
Colleen Lawton: Frank, how did you afford college? Did you get a scholarship? How did you afford it?
Frank Mahoney: Yes, I got a scholarship to college.
Colleen Lawton: I'm guessing your parents were going to pay for that.
Paul Wallner: Did your interest in physics and math begin in high school or was it really a little bit later?
Frank Mahoney: No, no. Math I always liked. The physics in high school was very put-offish. But I got to love physics. At Holy Cross, half my time was physics and physics related, much of the other half the was philosophy. I had some courses listed on my résumé that I don't even remember taking them, e.g., cosmology and epistemology.
Paul Wallner: I also went to a Jesuit college. You probably had a similar number of credits in physics and philosophy.
Frank Mahoney: Where did you go?
Paul Wallner: Saint Joseph's.
Frank Mahoney: Saint Joe, yeah. That's in Philly.
Colleen Lawton: That makes three of us. I went to Marquette – we're all Jesuit-trained.
Frank Mahoney: That's interesting. That's a whole new topic. I've become disenchanted with the Jesuits. They never got over the Vatican II. In Holy Cross we had some incredible priests – the most impressive collection of people I ever met. I was living on the campus and so were all the priests. There was one priest, J.B. Connors, referred to as "J.B.God." In the afternoon, you would often see him walking the campus, reading his breviary. He would be wearing something like a cape, which went over his shoulders.
On one occasion, he is approached by a student on crutches, hobbling along the walkway. As they pass, the student reaches out and touches the hem of JB God’s cape. Thereupon he discards his crutches and dashes off with his “injury" cured. So it was a very interesting, wall-to-wall, Irish Catholic place.
Paul Wallner: What prompted the slight deviation in your master’s to biology and away from physics?
Frank Mahoney: Well, after college I wanted to continue student-ing. I was pretty good at it and I liked it. At that time, the Atomic Energy Commission had some interesting fellowships. One was at MIT in nuclear engineering, and one was at Rochester in radiation biology, about radiation effects on biological systems. I didn't get the MIT one but I got the one for Rochester and I was ready to leave home. My mother passed away a year earlier. So I went off to Rochester and had a very nice experience there. Rochester was one of the key medical facilities of the Manhattan Project, the bomb project. So there were a lot of competent people there and things to learn. It was a nice group of students, people like myself, plus a number of Navy submariners, nuclear submarine docs, and some Air Force people. I found the coursework not too hard. You know, much easier than the physics I later shed blood over at Harvard and MIT.
After finishing at Rochester, I went for a job interview at what was called Knolls Atomic Power, a division of GE in Schenectady. It's amazing. In life, on occasion you encounter situations, which if you encountered them a week later, your whole life would be different. On this interview, a gent named Joe Fitzgerald interviewed me. He grew up in Boston, and he was leaving GE. He was going to Harvard to set up a radiological physics program. He said, ”When you get back to Boston, drop by, you may be interested.” He was looking for a graduate assistant. It turns out he came from Roxbury. One of his older brothers knew my oldest brother, Danno.
After Rochester I had a few bucks, so I went off to Ireland for a month. My father was going back for his first and only time. It was a very nice visit. When I got back to Boston, I dropped by Harvard. Joe Fitzgerald was there, and he got me in. I spent three-and-a-half years with him at the School of Public Health as a research and teaching assistant.
Paul Wallner: What kind of research were you doing there?
Frank Mahoney: Not much of any. The research assistant part of my time was helping to set up his radiologic program. It turned out that after a little less than four years Professor Fitzgerald left, for reasons I never quite understood, and set up a little company. I took numerous physics and math courses at Harvard in this interval. So I collected quite a few credits which ultimately resulted in an MS and an ME, which is sort of a super MS. Some people call it a consolation degree. It's most of the coursework for a PhD, but without a dissertation.
So, since I was tired of student-ing at this time, I went to work with him in his company. Mainly I co-authored a book on radiation dosimetry with him. That required a couple of years. Working there was a guy you probably heard of, Gordon Brownell, whose field was nuclear medicine, the engineering end of it. He was also professor in Nuclear Engineering at MIT. Around the time the book was completed, he was looking for a research student. So I went to work with him at MIT. This was where, seven years earlier, I failed to get an AEC fellowship. Between Harvard and MIT, most of my credits could be switched over. So I had the backbone of the classwork for a PhD in the Nuclear Engineering Department. I spent a while there taking engineering courses and then passed the qualifying exams for a PhD.
I didn't do my PhD with Professor Brownell. I did it with Professor Franklyn Clikeman. My dissertation was entitled “Gamma Rays from Fast Neutron Scattering.” It was built around a new kind of radiation detector that came out at that time: lithium-drifted germanium. It was a solid state device with much better resolution, etc. I completed my PhD requirements in September 1967.
Paul Wallner: What did you do following the completion of your PhD?
Frank Mahoney: Well, since I didn't think I was going to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, I wasn't particularly interested in academia. A fellow student at MIT, Ray Cooper, worked at a U.S. Army Lab in Natick, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. I joined him working on using radiation to sterilize food for soldiers. I worked there for three years before going to NIH.
Ray Cooper grew tired of bench science. He looked around and got a job in science administration at the Atomic Energy Commission in Maryland. Around the same time I heard about a training program at NIH called the Grants Associates. NIH meant very little to me. I had hardly heard of it. The GA Program took MDs and PhDs and turned them into Scientist-Administrators. These are trained scientists supervising the dispensing of mainly grant money to appropriate researchers around the country. The GA Program had a great reputation. It involved a year wandering around NIH and around Washington learning how the government worked. The program lasted about 30 years. It turned out maybe 120 people, most of whom stayed at NIH. A few joined research institutions supported by NIH. These 100+ GA alums were tightly knit, socially and professionally. They worked all over the extramural side of NIH, forming a great network for information transfer, and gossip, and so forth and so on.
Paul Wallner: The fact that you're all Irish probably didn't hurt.
Frank Mahoney: Yeah. I fit in nicely. During the training period, a GA would also look around for a job at NIH. Around that time neutron radiotherapy research was beginning. Mary Catterall in London, you probably remember that name.
Paul Wallner: Sure.
Frank Mahoney: She was an early “neutroneer,” in England. The head of the NCIs grants division was a transplanted Englishman, J. Palmer Saunders. He had a warm spot for neutrons. The radiation program was sort of, and remained during most of my career, a bit of a stepchild in what some in the Radiotherapy community called the National Chemotherapy Institute. Anyway, I’ve lost track.
Paul Wallner: When your training program finished, did you go right into what is now called Radiation Research Program?
Frank Mahoney: Yes.
Paul Wallner: Or was there an interim step?
Frank Mahoney: NIH has an intramural and an extramural side. The intramural is the biggest biological research establishment in the world, on Wisconsin Avenue in Bethesda. Intramural consumes about 20% of the NIH budget. The other 80% is dispensed mainly to U.S. research institutions usually as grants. NCI Extramural was looking for somebody who knew something about radiation research in general, and neutrons in particular. I love to tell people they hired me because I knew what LET meant. You know, Linear Energy Transfer. Nobody else did, so I got the job. Radiation people at NIH have a checkered history. Henry Kaplan, in his youth, spent some time there. Phil Rubin spent some time there. Before I got into what became the Radiation Research Program, the year before I got there, Bill Powers spent a year and then Pat Kavanagh, who you may recall, was there.
Paul Wallner: Well, Glenn Sheline, didn't he spend some time?
Frank Mahoney: This was before Eli's time. I’ll get to him later. Pat Kavanagh was there. Then there was a Puerto Rican, Raul Mercado, from Pittsburgh. Then Glenn Sheline and then a whole string of rad oncs, mainly a year at a time. I was the permanent base there. I stayed in the same job, which developed, expanded and reorganized adding people, for almost 35 years.
Paul Wallner: What was the nature of the transition through which you ultimately really moved much more into biology than physics?
Frank Mahoney: Well, there was a program of grants when I arrived and it expanded over the years. That was when the War on Cancer began in the Nixon administration in 1971 and 1972. Through my whole career there, most of the grants that I administered were radiobiological with a bit of radiation physics and chemistry. The RTOG and the groups were not administered by our program. They were located in a branch that managed all the cooperative groups. We did manage the Radiological Physics Center that monitored the quality of the radiation dose in radiation research, (i.e., rad is a rad is a rad). But most of the portfolio was radiobiological.
Parenthetically, radiation research is a genealogist’s dream. You know, So-and-So was trained by So-and-So who went on to train So-and-So. You go back to Kaplan, Fletcher, del Regato, Kligerman, etc. So knowing all of this was very interesting. But the program generally was a biology program. Maybe 80-90% of it, through my whole career, was biological.
Paul Wallner: When did the revolving door of leadership change to a more stable program?
Frank Mahoney: Stable, I'd question.
Paul Wallner: Perhaps that's the wrong term. Perhaps just a revolving door.
Frank Mahoney: All the grants during my first five or six years were located in one NCI division whose only business was the scientific and business administration of research grants. There was no research conducted in this grants division of NCI. Then a fellow by the name of Art Upton, a radiation pathologist from Oak Ridge National Lab, took over as the head of NCI. He was talked into reorganizing. All of the grant programs, which were then under one roof, were split up and moved to the other divisions.
We ended up under Vince DeVita, in the Division of Cancer Treatment. Vince was an impressive leader. He's still alive, a bit older than me. I think the only guy Vince ever held in awe was Henry Kaplan. I don't know how he got to know him, but when Vince was looking for an intramural radiation man, he went to Henry. That was how Eli Glatstein ended up at NCI.
Paul Wallner: Eli was never on the extramural side with you though. Wasn't he always intramural?
Frank Mahoney: Except during one of our difficult organizational times. For a while he was acting head of RRP in addition to his main responsibilities in Intramural NCI.
Paul Wallner: Right. Can you tell us a little bit about during those, what, 30-plus years, some of the things that you think were really successes of the program and some of the things that weren't so successful?
Frank Mahoney: Well, that’s how you measure success. Obviously, radiobiology is important in underpinning radiotherapy. But we didn't think much in terms of radiotherapy. The hottest issues at that time were particles, neutrons, pions, protons and heavier ions. In a certain sense, you'd call protons a big success story. It's like nuclear reactors in engineering academic institutions in the 1960s and 1970s. You had to get a nuclear reactor because you want to be the first one in your neighborhood.
Anyway, with protons, it's the same thing. We got into protons fairly early. I remember one of the first foreign trips I ever made for NCI was to Japan in 1975 where we went to look into proton therapy. I have a nice picture from that trip with some of the luminaries in radiotherapy: Rod Withers, Glenn Sheline, Bob Parker and so forth.
So protons. The high command at NCI was never very interested in protons. But people like Bill Powers and other RadOncs, through organizations like CROS and ROCS, were able to outflank the NCI command and get it to invest in neutrons. In the U.S., neutron work began at MD Anderson. Not actually at Anderson. It was being done at Texas A&M, in the countryside outside of Houston. Bob Parker in Seattle was doing some before he went to Los Angeles. actually, after he went to Los Angeles too.
Despite what some people have said I’m not the father of proton therapy. I’m not even the grandfather of proton therapy. I’m sort of the – I’m not sure what the right word is, maybe the godfather.
Paul Wallner: Frank, going back, it seems to me that the NCI Radiation Research Program funded a number of neutron projects for a while. But given the lack of success in some of those programs, did it sort of sour the NCI on protons? Because I don’t think there were that many funded proton projects. Were there?
Frank Mahoney: No. The original proton therapy project we funded was in Boston – actually in Cambridge – at the Harvard Cyclotron. Occasionally, someone would ask me what does the NCI think about this or that? From my point of view, I can’t tell you what the NCI thinks. It’s that simple. As I said earlier, we were a bit of a stepchild in NCI and we only got seriously into particles through the agitation of Bill Powers and other leaders of the radiation therapy community.
In the 1970s, we got into pions at Los Alamos. We spent lots of money there doing pion therapy studies. For some reason, Mort Kligerman decided he wanted to leave the Northeast and go to Los Alamos. So he became a “pioneer” out there. That went on for the better part of a decade until it was really clear that not much was happening with pions.
Around that time, Henry Kaplan was also interested in pions. He was preparing to approach us to build him a pion generator. Around that time, someone sent me a copy of a Stanford alumni publication that had a story about a Stanford pion facility. It left you with the impression that the facility already existed. In fact, you know, a magnetic device was developed to focus pions on a patient. It could be mated to a big accelerator somewhere. It was segmented like an orange with its skin peeled off.
National Science Foundation funded this device, which was expensive, through some magnetic people at Stanford. It was called the Orange Peel Spectrometer until it didn’t do too well and then some people referred to it as the Lemon Peel Spectrometer.
Paul Wallner: You mentioned Bill Powers as being an agitator. I knew him and I think that’s a reasonable term of use. Now that that generation is mostly gone, who were some of the other agitators?
Frank Mahoney: Well, I should tell you my favorite line with Bill when I’d run into him. I got to know quite a few of the senior people quite well because they had usually big grants which required a lot of monitoring and traveling for site visits and to attend dog and pony shows they put on and so forth and so on. But in later years, I used to see Bill a lot. When I ran into him I would ask, “Bill, I’ve forgotten, are we friends or enemies?”
Paul Wallner: It does not depend on the grant funding?
Frank Mahoney: Well, no. Oh, there’s endless stories. Where did Bill come from? Montana or Wyoming? Some place out there. When I first met him he was at Wash U. He spent a year at NCI Extramural before I got there. Then he was able to wrangle some money to fund the CROS, which was a pot of money to allow radiotherapy heavy hitters to gather and plan for where the field should be going. Another one of my favorite people was Simon Kramer. He had a sad ending. You knew Simon. He was a real magnificent human being.
Paul Wallner: A prince among men.
Frank Mahoney: Yeah. And Luther Brady was involved. And Kaplan was sort of above the field. He was beyond radiotherapy in those days. And Fletcher was in the latter part of his career. But in Boston we had Herman Suit at the Mass General. We had Hellman at what later was called the Joint Center. At Tufts Medical we had Fernando Bloedorn. And that was just Boston. All of these had big grants and I got to know these people quite well in that way. I think you had interviewed like 80 people on this program that we’re meeting here today about.
Paul Wallner: We have.
Frank Mahoney: Thirty of them I think I knew fairly well. I had dinner with them more than once. Mainly, because they had big grants, which were complicated things to manage.
Paul Wallner: When you were given the ASTRO Honorary Membership Award in 2005, a number of people we spoke to said that you had saved their careers and talked them “off the ledge.” And really, with the underpinning of radiobiology in the United States, can you tell us a little bit about how you saved some of those careers?
Frank Mahoney: I love to hear that. But like most stuff, it’s a little overblown. The NIH grant and funding process is complicated. Especially for younger investigators, it’s intimidating to say the least. Basically, I talked with them about how to navigate the grant process. I talked to them about what they should do when they got an un-fundable priority on their grant and whether they were being encouraged by peer reviewers to come back or not and that kind of thing. I put some serious time in with them which you don't get from many federal government civil servants. And maybe I talked a few off of a few ledges, too. The ones who didn’t successfully come back, you don’t hear from them. But I got to know a lot of people in the field in this way also.
Paul Wallner: I know you’ve been out of the program for a while now, but what do you see is the status of radiation research within the NCI and externally?
Frank Mahoney: Interesting you should ask. I belong to the American Physical Society, APS. They have an extensive array of peer-reviewed journals, but they also have one called Physics Today which is meant for physicists to learn about areas of physics they really are not expert in. Recently, in the last October edition, there an article called Alarm Sounded over Declining U.S. Radiation Professional Workforce. In it is a table with a lot of detail. They talk about health physics. They talk about medical physics. They talk about diagnostic and therapeutic radiology. They talk about nuclear engineering. They talk about radiobiology and radiation and nuclear chemistry.
In this collection of specialties, on this topic, some of them are doing better than others. But as a group they’re not doing terribly well. When we have another terrible nuclear episode, perhaps like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, whatever, we are not in good shape to handle it. Too many experts have died off or retired. I knew many of them. I knew radiobiology’s situation. A lot of training programs have shut down. But I didn’t know, as I think they very nicely described, how ubiquitous it is in other radiation-related areas.
Paul Wallner: One of the issues that we hear regularly is that we’d be turned around if the NCI or one of the other government agencies put more money into training. But do you really believe that would be the case?
Frank Mahoney: Well, training also, it was not under our purview. All the clinical groups were clustered. All the training programs were also clustered. But we kept an eye on them and so forth. I’m not sure. I got less and less interested in the fine details of NCI in the 18 years that I’ve been out. I think it’s safe to say I don’t think there’s any great agitation for more training programs.
Paul Wallner: I was about to ask you what the kids are up to, but they’re certainly not kids. I remember in 2005, when you got the honorary membership, I suggested that everyone in the audience should try to recruit Kathleen because she was finishing her MD-PhD. She’s now at Brigham I think, isn’t she?
Frank Mahoney: She is at the Beth-Israel Deaconess. That reminds me of one of the ironies of life. One of my bosses in NCI was Bruce Chabner. I don’t know if that name resonates with you.
Paul Wallner: Sure.
Frank Mahoney: He later went to MGH. I think he’s not quite retired yet. He had a daughter who became a radiation oncologist and I have a daughter, Kathleen, who became a medical oncologist. She’s an MD-PhD. I think she’s an MD about one day a week and a PhD the rest of the time.
Paul Wallner: What is her area of interest?
Frank Mahoney: It was immunotherapy as it relates to cancer. It was interesting because, as you know, my wife passed away almost three years ago.
Paul Wallner: Yeah. I’m sorry to hear that.
Frank Mahoney: She died from melanoma. There were some drugs related to immunology that had some great potential, some great successes with melanoma. Kathleen is working in this area. This field won a Nobel Prize in medicine five years ago. One of the guys who might have gotten a piece of the Prize but he didn’t, she’s been working with for a dozen years or so. She went to med school in Connecticut, and she got an MD-PhD. Then she went to Weil/Cornell in New York City on an internship. Then she went on to the BID in a medical oncology residency.
Paul Wallner: What are Michael and Stephen doing?
Frank Mahoney: Michael is a mathematical physicist at Berkeley. His wife comes from Berkeley. She is an anthropologist. She interested in the history of the development of written language. If you have any cuneiform tablets, she’s the girl to go to.
Paul Wallner: We’re cleaning out a little bit. I’ll look for that.
Frank Mahoney: Michael is working on what is called "Big Data,” the mathematical techniques thereof. If you have a ton of data and you want to go looking for the needle in the haystack, you use stuff that he’s developed. It fits everywhere. It fits on Wall Street. It fits on habitable planets in the universe. It fits in Genetics. So he’s in that area and doing quite well. He has two kids.
My third child, Stephen, he’s a lawyer. He worked for FDA before going to Roche, the Swiss drug company, in their Washington office to keep them from getting in trouble with FDA. But now he’s moved on to another outfit in the San Francisco area.
Paul Wallner: Is he considered the black sheep by not going into science and getting a PhD?
Frank Mahoney: No. He has a master’s in molecular something or other. But he’s found his place in law. He thinks like a lawyer. He has three kids.
My children have provided me with six grandchildren. The first one is now off to college. Actually, three of them were adopted with genes from around the world. Over eighty years ago, my father was worried about letting Sicilians into the family tree, Last December we added a new little girl whose mother is from Nepal, in the foothills of the Himalayas. So there aren’t many places left in the world that haven’t infiltrated into our family tree.
Paul Wallner: But you won’t find any Mahoneys there. I wouldn’t think.
Frank Mahoney: Well, who knows?
Paul Wallner: Are you doing much babysitting these days?
Frank Mahoney: No. Of my six grandchildren, three live locally. Kathleen, although she’s not married, has adopted a little boy. Michael has two kids and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. I see my three local grandchildren a couple of times a month. The oldest now is off in college. They’re globetrotting. It’s amazing. I remember I didn’t get much further than Worcester in growing up. Today daughter is giving a paper in Dublin and she’ll fly by after a couple of days. My oldest granddaughter is going off to Ireland for a week next week to visit with friends of friends. So it’s intimidating.
Paul Wallner: When they go to Ireland, do they carry the names of the various Mahoneys to visit?
Frank Mahoney: Sometimes they visit. On these visits they won’t. Irish history is very interesting. Ireland has only had one king and he died on the battlefield that made him king of the whole country. Brian Boru, 1014.
So Ireland, even though it’s next door to England, had a very different social system. It was a tribal system in the sense of familial blood, familial groups. The Mahoneys or the O’Mahonys were not at the very top of the pecking order but they’re a significant group. In fact, the place where my father was born is still in the family. A cousin, Michael O'Mahony, lives there. Our ancestors married into that land in 1775 and they’ve been there since. So it’s nice to have cousins whom you know well and whom you visit as often as you do.
Paul Wallner: That’s great. Colleen, do you have any questions?
Colleen Lawton: No, no. But I learned a great deal. So thank you for your time, Frank.
Paul Wallner: Frank, are there any things that we haven’t covered that you’d like to talk about?
Frank Mahoney: I don’t think so. Most of the elder statesmen in academic radiation oncology are no longer with us. But I was fortunate enough to know many of them. It was a marvelous experience.
As I said my mother is a Mahoney. So, over the decades I got big into genealogy and now genetic genealogy. I have a genealogical program with 1,600+ people in it, almost all of whom are related one way or another to me.
The same thing applies in the radiotherapy business. Professionally, you may be descended from Fletcher, or Kaplan or del Regato. None of these people were boring.
Another interest I have is collecting pithy sayings that resonate with me. I am sure you have had the experience of being behind a car at a stoplight that has stickers all over its back. They have three kids, a collie dog. Over the years I have collected pithy sayings and it’s amazing how many of them fit situations I have encountered. For example, there is one from Shalom Aleichem about having to “muddle your way through life until the end even if it kills you.” Then there’s another one. There was a radio comedian, Fred Allen, who was on Sunday nights in the ‘40s and ‘50s. He was from Boston. His humor would be banned now. But he had a saying I liked: “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me rather than a prefrontal lobotomy.” Figure that one out.
Paul Wallner: I think, with that, we’re about at the end of the hour. So thank you very much. This has been incredible. You’ve got stories, and know where skeletons are buried, and really were the glue that held a lot of these things together over the years. We really appreciate your insight and your time.
Frank Mahoney: Well, I appreciate talking. I now live alone, and I have found out that I enjoy a hermit’s life. But I still need and enjoy people, you know.
Colleen Lawton: Thank you so much.
Paul Wallner: You take care. Thanks very much. And thank you, Colleen and Alana.
Paul Wallner: Good afternoon. On behalf of the ASTRO History Committee and my committee colleague, Dr. Colleen Lawton, I want to thank Dr. Mahoney for agreeing to sit for this interview. Dr. Mahoney was a long-time senior leader of the NCI’s Radiation Research Program, and a recipient of ASTRO Honorary Membership in 2005. Your biographical sketch indicates that you were born in Boston. Was it in the city Proper? That's a suburb of Boston, isn't it?
Frank Mahoney: Yes. It was in Roxbury, one of a dozen or so neighborhoods in the city. I'm the youngest of eight children, two girls and six boys. My oldest sibling, Elizabeth, is 17 years older than me. Our mother’s maiden name is Mahoney. I got interested in genealogy in order to find out what degree of cousin of myself I was. My parents were immigrants. They were born and raised 20 miles apart in Ireland, in County Cork. But they never met until they got to Boston. I’ve become a fan of a program on PBS TV called Finding Your Roots, hosted by Henry Louis Gates, a Harvard professor. He has two guests in each one hour episode, wherein he delves into their genealogy. From watching Gates' program, I’ve learned that parents often never tell their children much about their ancestry. It’s amazing how ignorant many of us are about it. My parents rarely talked much about ours. But in my genealogical pursuits, I've gotten back to Ireland a number of times. The place where my father was born is still in the extended family and now occupied by a first cousin, once removed. I pause here remembering that I collect pithy sayings. One of my favorites is: “My memory is getting bad. There are three things I have trouble remembering. One is faces and the other is names. The third one is – I forgot.”
Paul Wallner: Do you know when your parents came to this country?
Frank Mahoney: Yes, before the First World War, 1911 and 1913. My mother was one of eight. My father was one of 11. He was sort of in the middle of the family in birth order. He was trained as a blacksmith and practiced the trade up until the end of the Second World War. Initially, he worked in various shops around town. Luckily, just before the market crashed in 1929, he got a permanent job with the City of Boston. So, during the Depression, though not very much, there was money coming in every week which relieved a lot of anxiety.
Paul Wallner: Just out of curiosity, what did the City of Boston do with blacksmiths?
Frank Mahoney: Well, up until the end of WWII, they had lots of horses. After that he worked on things like beat up snowplows. Anyway, they had eight kids in my family. I was the youngest. The oldest was sister Elizabeth and she was 17 years older than me. She married an Italian guy which –
Paul Wallner: Was that a problem?
Frank Mahoney: Well, when my father was told about her plans, he was not overjoyed especially since the runner-up for her hand was another Mahoney, I guess so we could keep up our incestuous marriages. Anyway, when my father expressed dissatisfaction upon being told she was going to marry an Italian, one of her brothers said that, at least he's a Catholic. Dad replied that he's not a Catholic, he's a Mediterranean Catholic. Those Spanish and Italians, they think the Ten Commandments are advisory. But this Italian turned out to be a real winner. And my father learned to love him like another son. He also became sort of my second father. Being the youngest in the family and with my parents in their 40s when I was born and my oldest sister marrying when I was 5 years old, some funny relationship developed. It is often said that in families, people cluster in triplets. You know, you're closer to the one above you and the one below you. I have no one below me, being the youngest, and the one ahead of me is my brother, John. So we were quite close.
Paul Wallner: What was it like growing up in a family with seven siblings?
Frank Mahoney: Well, let me finish my thought. My parents were like grandparents. My oldest sister and her husband were like parents and their kids were like siblings. They didn't live too far away. My siblings, except for the brother right ahead of me, were like uncles and aunts. I was born in 1936 in the depths of the Depression and life expectancy at that time was 62 years. As it turned out, I got lucky. I spent my life in the best place in the world at the best time in human history. As I was telling Paul, I don't envy my grandchildren. They are likely to be around for the rest of the 21st century. There are many very scary scenarios possible in that time.
Paul Wallner: Tell us a little bit about your schooling – about elementary, high school, then college?
Frank Mahoney: I went to Catholic schools. Eight years of nuns and eight years of Jesuits.
Paul Wallner: Did you behave yourself or did you get your knuckles rapped?
Frank Mahoney: Not too often. I was sneaky smart most of the time. Only one or two nuns figured me out. The others I was able to hoodwink. After elementary school, I won a scholarship to Boston College High School. That is the high school branch of Boston College. I went to Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass. It's west of Boston, 40 miles or so. I went into physics because I liked math and my brother, John, was in engineering at the time. Holy Cross, a Jesuit institution, was almost like a seminary in those days. All males. No females allowed on campus except on rare occasions. And mass every day at 7:00 a.m., except Sunday.
Worcester is much colder and much snowier than Boston, especially much snowier. It is on the north side of Mt. St. James, called “the hill with pleasant springs.” For years, I thought that meant water running out of the ground, but in fact it refers to the season of the year. Springtime is glorious for a number of reasons. The major one is that winter is over. So, anyway, I got a physics degree in 1957.
Colleen Lawton: Frank, how did you afford college? Did you get a scholarship? How did you afford it?
Frank Mahoney: Yes, I got a scholarship to college.
Colleen Lawton: I'm guessing your parents were going to pay for that.
Paul Wallner: Did your interest in physics and math begin in high school or was it really a little bit later?
Frank Mahoney: No, no. Math I always liked. The physics in high school was very put-offish. But I got to love physics. At Holy Cross, half my time was physics and physics related, much of the other half the was philosophy. I had some courses listed on my résumé that I don't even remember taking them, e.g., cosmology and epistemology.
Paul Wallner: I also went to a Jesuit college. You probably had a similar number of credits in physics and philosophy.
Frank Mahoney: Where did you go?
Paul Wallner: Saint Joseph's.
Frank Mahoney: Saint Joe, yeah. That's in Philly.
Colleen Lawton: That makes three of us. I went to Marquette – we're all Jesuit-trained.
Frank Mahoney: That's interesting. That's a whole new topic. I've become disenchanted with the Jesuits. They never got over the Vatican II. In Holy Cross we had some incredible priests – the most impressive collection of people I ever met. I was living on the campus and so were all the priests. There was one priest, J.B. Connors, referred to as "J.B.God." In the afternoon, you would often see him walking the campus, reading his breviary. He would be wearing something like a cape, which went over his shoulders.
On one occasion, he is approached by a student on crutches, hobbling along the walkway. As they pass, the student reaches out and touches the hem of JB God’s cape. Thereupon he discards his crutches and dashes off with his “injury" cured. So it was a very interesting, wall-to-wall, Irish Catholic place.
Paul Wallner: What prompted the slight deviation in your master’s to biology and away from physics?
Frank Mahoney: Well, after college I wanted to continue student-ing. I was pretty good at it and I liked it. At that time, the Atomic Energy Commission had some interesting fellowships. One was at MIT in nuclear engineering, and one was at Rochester in radiation biology, about radiation effects on biological systems. I didn't get the MIT one but I got the one for Rochester and I was ready to leave home. My mother passed away a year earlier. So I went off to Rochester and had a very nice experience there. Rochester was one of the key medical facilities of the Manhattan Project, the bomb project. So there were a lot of competent people there and things to learn. It was a nice group of students, people like myself, plus a number of Navy submariners, nuclear submarine docs, and some Air Force people. I found the coursework not too hard. You know, much easier than the physics I later shed blood over at Harvard and MIT.
After finishing at Rochester, I went for a job interview at what was called Knolls Atomic Power, a division of GE in Schenectady. It's amazing. In life, on occasion you encounter situations, which if you encountered them a week later, your whole life would be different. On this interview, a gent named Joe Fitzgerald interviewed me. He grew up in Boston, and he was leaving GE. He was going to Harvard to set up a radiological physics program. He said, ”When you get back to Boston, drop by, you may be interested.” He was looking for a graduate assistant. It turns out he came from Roxbury. One of his older brothers knew my oldest brother, Danno.
After Rochester I had a few bucks, so I went off to Ireland for a month. My father was going back for his first and only time. It was a very nice visit. When I got back to Boston, I dropped by Harvard. Joe Fitzgerald was there, and he got me in. I spent three-and-a-half years with him at the School of Public Health as a research and teaching assistant.
Paul Wallner: What kind of research were you doing there?
Frank Mahoney: Not much of any. The research assistant part of my time was helping to set up his radiologic program. It turned out that after a little less than four years Professor Fitzgerald left, for reasons I never quite understood, and set up a little company. I took numerous physics and math courses at Harvard in this interval. So I collected quite a few credits which ultimately resulted in an MS and an ME, which is sort of a super MS. Some people call it a consolation degree. It's most of the coursework for a PhD, but without a dissertation.
So, since I was tired of student-ing at this time, I went to work with him in his company. Mainly I co-authored a book on radiation dosimetry with him. That required a couple of years. Working there was a guy you probably heard of, Gordon Brownell, whose field was nuclear medicine, the engineering end of it. He was also professor in Nuclear Engineering at MIT. Around the time the book was completed, he was looking for a research student. So I went to work with him at MIT. This was where, seven years earlier, I failed to get an AEC fellowship. Between Harvard and MIT, most of my credits could be switched over. So I had the backbone of the classwork for a PhD in the Nuclear Engineering Department. I spent a while there taking engineering courses and then passed the qualifying exams for a PhD.
I didn't do my PhD with Professor Brownell. I did it with Professor Franklyn Clikeman. My dissertation was entitled “Gamma Rays from Fast Neutron Scattering.” It was built around a new kind of radiation detector that came out at that time: lithium-drifted germanium. It was a solid state device with much better resolution, etc. I completed my PhD requirements in September 1967.
Paul Wallner: What did you do following the completion of your PhD?
Frank Mahoney: Well, since I didn't think I was going to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, I wasn't particularly interested in academia. A fellow student at MIT, Ray Cooper, worked at a U.S. Army Lab in Natick, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. I joined him working on using radiation to sterilize food for soldiers. I worked there for three years before going to NIH.
Ray Cooper grew tired of bench science. He looked around and got a job in science administration at the Atomic Energy Commission in Maryland. Around the same time I heard about a training program at NIH called the Grants Associates. NIH meant very little to me. I had hardly heard of it. The GA Program took MDs and PhDs and turned them into Scientist-Administrators. These are trained scientists supervising the dispensing of mainly grant money to appropriate researchers around the country. The GA Program had a great reputation. It involved a year wandering around NIH and around Washington learning how the government worked. The program lasted about 30 years. It turned out maybe 120 people, most of whom stayed at NIH. A few joined research institutions supported by NIH. These 100+ GA alums were tightly knit, socially and professionally. They worked all over the extramural side of NIH, forming a great network for information transfer, and gossip, and so forth and so on.
Paul Wallner: The fact that you're all Irish probably didn't hurt.
Frank Mahoney: Yeah. I fit in nicely. During the training period, a GA would also look around for a job at NIH. Around that time neutron radiotherapy research was beginning. Mary Catterall in London, you probably remember that name.
Paul Wallner: Sure.
Frank Mahoney: She was an early “neutroneer,” in England. The head of the NCIs grants division was a transplanted Englishman, J. Palmer Saunders. He had a warm spot for neutrons. The radiation program was sort of, and remained during most of my career, a bit of a stepchild in what some in the Radiotherapy community called the National Chemotherapy Institute. Anyway, I’ve lost track.
Paul Wallner: When your training program finished, did you go right into what is now called Radiation Research Program?
Frank Mahoney: Yes.
Paul Wallner: Or was there an interim step?
Frank Mahoney: NIH has an intramural and an extramural side. The intramural is the biggest biological research establishment in the world, on Wisconsin Avenue in Bethesda. Intramural consumes about 20% of the NIH budget. The other 80% is dispensed mainly to U.S. research institutions usually as grants. NCI Extramural was looking for somebody who knew something about radiation research in general, and neutrons in particular. I love to tell people they hired me because I knew what LET meant. You know, Linear Energy Transfer. Nobody else did, so I got the job. Radiation people at NIH have a checkered history. Henry Kaplan, in his youth, spent some time there. Phil Rubin spent some time there. Before I got into what became the Radiation Research Program, the year before I got there, Bill Powers spent a year and then Pat Kavanagh, who you may recall, was there.
Paul Wallner: Well, Glenn Sheline, didn't he spend some time?
Frank Mahoney: This was before Eli's time. I’ll get to him later. Pat Kavanagh was there. Then there was a Puerto Rican, Raul Mercado, from Pittsburgh. Then Glenn Sheline and then a whole string of rad oncs, mainly a year at a time. I was the permanent base there. I stayed in the same job, which developed, expanded and reorganized adding people, for almost 35 years.
Paul Wallner: What was the nature of the transition through which you ultimately really moved much more into biology than physics?
Frank Mahoney: Well, there was a program of grants when I arrived and it expanded over the years. That was when the War on Cancer began in the Nixon administration in 1971 and 1972. Through my whole career there, most of the grants that I administered were radiobiological with a bit of radiation physics and chemistry. The RTOG and the groups were not administered by our program. They were located in a branch that managed all the cooperative groups. We did manage the Radiological Physics Center that monitored the quality of the radiation dose in radiation research, (i.e., rad is a rad is a rad). But most of the portfolio was radiobiological.
Parenthetically, radiation research is a genealogist’s dream. You know, So-and-So was trained by So-and-So who went on to train So-and-So. You go back to Kaplan, Fletcher, del Regato, Kligerman, etc. So knowing all of this was very interesting. But the program generally was a biology program. Maybe 80-90% of it, through my whole career, was biological.
Paul Wallner: When did the revolving door of leadership change to a more stable program?
Frank Mahoney: Stable, I'd question.
Paul Wallner: Perhaps that's the wrong term. Perhaps just a revolving door.
Frank Mahoney: All the grants during my first five or six years were located in one NCI division whose only business was the scientific and business administration of research grants. There was no research conducted in this grants division of NCI. Then a fellow by the name of Art Upton, a radiation pathologist from Oak Ridge National Lab, took over as the head of NCI. He was talked into reorganizing. All of the grant programs, which were then under one roof, were split up and moved to the other divisions.
We ended up under Vince DeVita, in the Division of Cancer Treatment. Vince was an impressive leader. He's still alive, a bit older than me. I think the only guy Vince ever held in awe was Henry Kaplan. I don't know how he got to know him, but when Vince was looking for an intramural radiation man, he went to Henry. That was how Eli Glatstein ended up at NCI.
Paul Wallner: Eli was never on the extramural side with you though. Wasn't he always intramural?
Frank Mahoney: Except during one of our difficult organizational times. For a while he was acting head of RRP in addition to his main responsibilities in Intramural NCI.
Paul Wallner: Right. Can you tell us a little bit about during those, what, 30-plus years, some of the things that you think were really successes of the program and some of the things that weren't so successful?
Frank Mahoney: Well, that’s how you measure success. Obviously, radiobiology is important in underpinning radiotherapy. But we didn't think much in terms of radiotherapy. The hottest issues at that time were particles, neutrons, pions, protons and heavier ions. In a certain sense, you'd call protons a big success story. It's like nuclear reactors in engineering academic institutions in the 1960s and 1970s. You had to get a nuclear reactor because you want to be the first one in your neighborhood.
Anyway, with protons, it's the same thing. We got into protons fairly early. I remember one of the first foreign trips I ever made for NCI was to Japan in 1975 where we went to look into proton therapy. I have a nice picture from that trip with some of the luminaries in radiotherapy: Rod Withers, Glenn Sheline, Bob Parker and so forth.
So protons. The high command at NCI was never very interested in protons. But people like Bill Powers and other RadOncs, through organizations like CROS and ROCS, were able to outflank the NCI command and get it to invest in neutrons. In the U.S., neutron work began at MD Anderson. Not actually at Anderson. It was being done at Texas A&M, in the countryside outside of Houston. Bob Parker in Seattle was doing some before he went to Los Angeles. actually, after he went to Los Angeles too.
Despite what some people have said I’m not the father of proton therapy. I’m not even the grandfather of proton therapy. I’m sort of the – I’m not sure what the right word is, maybe the godfather.
Paul Wallner: Frank, going back, it seems to me that the NCI Radiation Research Program funded a number of neutron projects for a while. But given the lack of success in some of those programs, did it sort of sour the NCI on protons? Because I don’t think there were that many funded proton projects. Were there?
Frank Mahoney: No. The original proton therapy project we funded was in Boston – actually in Cambridge – at the Harvard Cyclotron. Occasionally, someone would ask me what does the NCI think about this or that? From my point of view, I can’t tell you what the NCI thinks. It’s that simple. As I said earlier, we were a bit of a stepchild in NCI and we only got seriously into particles through the agitation of Bill Powers and other leaders of the radiation therapy community.
In the 1970s, we got into pions at Los Alamos. We spent lots of money there doing pion therapy studies. For some reason, Mort Kligerman decided he wanted to leave the Northeast and go to Los Alamos. So he became a “pioneer” out there. That went on for the better part of a decade until it was really clear that not much was happening with pions.
Around that time, Henry Kaplan was also interested in pions. He was preparing to approach us to build him a pion generator. Around that time, someone sent me a copy of a Stanford alumni publication that had a story about a Stanford pion facility. It left you with the impression that the facility already existed. In fact, you know, a magnetic device was developed to focus pions on a patient. It could be mated to a big accelerator somewhere. It was segmented like an orange with its skin peeled off.
National Science Foundation funded this device, which was expensive, through some magnetic people at Stanford. It was called the Orange Peel Spectrometer until it didn’t do too well and then some people referred to it as the Lemon Peel Spectrometer.
Paul Wallner: You mentioned Bill Powers as being an agitator. I knew him and I think that’s a reasonable term of use. Now that that generation is mostly gone, who were some of the other agitators?
Frank Mahoney: Well, I should tell you my favorite line with Bill when I’d run into him. I got to know quite a few of the senior people quite well because they had usually big grants which required a lot of monitoring and traveling for site visits and to attend dog and pony shows they put on and so forth and so on. But in later years, I used to see Bill a lot. When I ran into him I would ask, “Bill, I’ve forgotten, are we friends or enemies?”
Paul Wallner: It does not depend on the grant funding?
Frank Mahoney: Well, no. Oh, there’s endless stories. Where did Bill come from? Montana or Wyoming? Some place out there. When I first met him he was at Wash U. He spent a year at NCI Extramural before I got there. Then he was able to wrangle some money to fund the CROS, which was a pot of money to allow radiotherapy heavy hitters to gather and plan for where the field should be going. Another one of my favorite people was Simon Kramer. He had a sad ending. You knew Simon. He was a real magnificent human being.
Paul Wallner: A prince among men.
Frank Mahoney: Yeah. And Luther Brady was involved. And Kaplan was sort of above the field. He was beyond radiotherapy in those days. And Fletcher was in the latter part of his career. But in Boston we had Herman Suit at the Mass General. We had Hellman at what later was called the Joint Center. At Tufts Medical we had Fernando Bloedorn. And that was just Boston. All of these had big grants and I got to know these people quite well in that way. I think you had interviewed like 80 people on this program that we’re meeting here today about.
Paul Wallner: We have.
Frank Mahoney: Thirty of them I think I knew fairly well. I had dinner with them more than once. Mainly, because they had big grants, which were complicated things to manage.
Paul Wallner: When you were given the ASTRO Honorary Membership Award in 2005, a number of people we spoke to said that you had saved their careers and talked them “off the ledge.” And really, with the underpinning of radiobiology in the United States, can you tell us a little bit about how you saved some of those careers?
Frank Mahoney: I love to hear that. But like most stuff, it’s a little overblown. The NIH grant and funding process is complicated. Especially for younger investigators, it’s intimidating to say the least. Basically, I talked with them about how to navigate the grant process. I talked to them about what they should do when they got an un-fundable priority on their grant and whether they were being encouraged by peer reviewers to come back or not and that kind of thing. I put some serious time in with them which you don't get from many federal government civil servants. And maybe I talked a few off of a few ledges, too. The ones who didn’t successfully come back, you don’t hear from them. But I got to know a lot of people in the field in this way also.
Paul Wallner: I know you’ve been out of the program for a while now, but what do you see is the status of radiation research within the NCI and externally?
Frank Mahoney: Interesting you should ask. I belong to the American Physical Society, APS. They have an extensive array of peer-reviewed journals, but they also have one called Physics Today which is meant for physicists to learn about areas of physics they really are not expert in. Recently, in the last October edition, there an article called Alarm Sounded over Declining U.S. Radiation Professional Workforce. In it is a table with a lot of detail. They talk about health physics. They talk about medical physics. They talk about diagnostic and therapeutic radiology. They talk about nuclear engineering. They talk about radiobiology and radiation and nuclear chemistry.
In this collection of specialties, on this topic, some of them are doing better than others. But as a group they’re not doing terribly well. When we have another terrible nuclear episode, perhaps like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, whatever, we are not in good shape to handle it. Too many experts have died off or retired. I knew many of them. I knew radiobiology’s situation. A lot of training programs have shut down. But I didn’t know, as I think they very nicely described, how ubiquitous it is in other radiation-related areas.
Paul Wallner: One of the issues that we hear regularly is that we’d be turned around if the NCI or one of the other government agencies put more money into training. But do you really believe that would be the case?
Frank Mahoney: Well, training also, it was not under our purview. All the clinical groups were clustered. All the training programs were also clustered. But we kept an eye on them and so forth. I’m not sure. I got less and less interested in the fine details of NCI in the 18 years that I’ve been out. I think it’s safe to say I don’t think there’s any great agitation for more training programs.
Paul Wallner: I was about to ask you what the kids are up to, but they’re certainly not kids. I remember in 2005, when you got the honorary membership, I suggested that everyone in the audience should try to recruit Kathleen because she was finishing her MD-PhD. She’s now at Brigham I think, isn’t she?
Frank Mahoney: She is at the Beth-Israel Deaconess. That reminds me of one of the ironies of life. One of my bosses in NCI was Bruce Chabner. I don’t know if that name resonates with you.
Paul Wallner: Sure.
Frank Mahoney: He later went to MGH. I think he’s not quite retired yet. He had a daughter who became a radiation oncologist and I have a daughter, Kathleen, who became a medical oncologist. She’s an MD-PhD. I think she’s an MD about one day a week and a PhD the rest of the time.
Paul Wallner: What is her area of interest?
Frank Mahoney: It was immunotherapy as it relates to cancer. It was interesting because, as you know, my wife passed away almost three years ago.
Paul Wallner: Yeah. I’m sorry to hear that.
Frank Mahoney: She died from melanoma. There were some drugs related to immunology that had some great potential, some great successes with melanoma. Kathleen is working in this area. This field won a Nobel Prize in medicine five years ago. One of the guys who might have gotten a piece of the Prize but he didn’t, she’s been working with for a dozen years or so. She went to med school in Connecticut, and she got an MD-PhD. Then she went to Weil/Cornell in New York City on an internship. Then she went on to the BID in a medical oncology residency.
Paul Wallner: What are Michael and Stephen doing?
Frank Mahoney: Michael is a mathematical physicist at Berkeley. His wife comes from Berkeley. She is an anthropologist. She interested in the history of the development of written language. If you have any cuneiform tablets, she’s the girl to go to.
Paul Wallner: We’re cleaning out a little bit. I’ll look for that.
Frank Mahoney: Michael is working on what is called "Big Data,” the mathematical techniques thereof. If you have a ton of data and you want to go looking for the needle in the haystack, you use stuff that he’s developed. It fits everywhere. It fits on Wall Street. It fits on habitable planets in the universe. It fits in Genetics. So he’s in that area and doing quite well. He has two kids.
My third child, Stephen, he’s a lawyer. He worked for FDA before going to Roche, the Swiss drug company, in their Washington office to keep them from getting in trouble with FDA. But now he’s moved on to another outfit in the San Francisco area.
Paul Wallner: Is he considered the black sheep by not going into science and getting a PhD?
Frank Mahoney: No. He has a master’s in molecular something or other. But he’s found his place in law. He thinks like a lawyer. He has three kids.
My children have provided me with six grandchildren. The first one is now off to college. Actually, three of them were adopted with genes from around the world. Over eighty years ago, my father was worried about letting Sicilians into the family tree, Last December we added a new little girl whose mother is from Nepal, in the foothills of the Himalayas. So there aren’t many places left in the world that haven’t infiltrated into our family tree.
Paul Wallner: But you won’t find any Mahoneys there. I wouldn’t think.
Frank Mahoney: Well, who knows?
Paul Wallner: Are you doing much babysitting these days?
Frank Mahoney: No. Of my six grandchildren, three live locally. Kathleen, although she’s not married, has adopted a little boy. Michael has two kids and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. I see my three local grandchildren a couple of times a month. The oldest now is off in college. They’re globetrotting. It’s amazing. I remember I didn’t get much further than Worcester in growing up. Today daughter is giving a paper in Dublin and she’ll fly by after a couple of days. My oldest granddaughter is going off to Ireland for a week next week to visit with friends of friends. So it’s intimidating.
Paul Wallner: When they go to Ireland, do they carry the names of the various Mahoneys to visit?
Frank Mahoney: Sometimes they visit. On these visits they won’t. Irish history is very interesting. Ireland has only had one king and he died on the battlefield that made him king of the whole country. Brian Boru, 1014.
So Ireland, even though it’s next door to England, had a very different social system. It was a tribal system in the sense of familial blood, familial groups. The Mahoneys or the O’Mahonys were not at the very top of the pecking order but they’re a significant group. In fact, the place where my father was born is still in the family. A cousin, Michael O'Mahony, lives there. Our ancestors married into that land in 1775 and they’ve been there since. So it’s nice to have cousins whom you know well and whom you visit as often as you do.
Paul Wallner: That’s great. Colleen, do you have any questions?
Colleen Lawton: No, no. But I learned a great deal. So thank you for your time, Frank.
Paul Wallner: Frank, are there any things that we haven’t covered that you’d like to talk about?
Frank Mahoney: I don’t think so. Most of the elder statesmen in academic radiation oncology are no longer with us. But I was fortunate enough to know many of them. It was a marvelous experience.
As I said my mother is a Mahoney. So, over the decades I got big into genealogy and now genetic genealogy. I have a genealogical program with 1,600+ people in it, almost all of whom are related one way or another to me.
The same thing applies in the radiotherapy business. Professionally, you may be descended from Fletcher, or Kaplan or del Regato. None of these people were boring.
Another interest I have is collecting pithy sayings that resonate with me. I am sure you have had the experience of being behind a car at a stoplight that has stickers all over its back. They have three kids, a collie dog. Over the years I have collected pithy sayings and it’s amazing how many of them fit situations I have encountered. For example, there is one from Shalom Aleichem about having to “muddle your way through life until the end even if it kills you.” Then there’s another one. There was a radio comedian, Fred Allen, who was on Sunday nights in the ‘40s and ‘50s. He was from Boston. His humor would be banned now. But he had a saying I liked: “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me rather than a prefrontal lobotomy.” Figure that one out.
Paul Wallner: I think, with that, we’re about at the end of the hour. So thank you very much. This has been incredible. You’ve got stories, and know where skeletons are buried, and really were the glue that held a lot of these things together over the years. We really appreciate your insight and your time.
Frank Mahoney: Well, I appreciate talking. I now live alone, and I have found out that I enjoy a hermit’s life. But I still need and enjoy people, you know.
Colleen Lawton: Thank you so much.
Paul Wallner: You take care. Thanks very much. And thank you, Colleen and Alana.
