#sloan-kettering

In a sign of admitting guilt for mismanagement, I'm eating prunes.

I wrapped up Day One of my second cycle of chemotherapy today, and there is no way in hell I was going to go through this one with another stinging cactus in my ass. I can't remember the last time I snacked on prunes, but I remember, vaguely, why I had stopped. It must have been one summer while I was in elementary school when I attacked a whole bag of them, when my stomach began to rumble. Lets just say that what I expected to be a discreet flatus turned out to have some flow. And I recall not being near a bathroom.

But this time it's different. I'm now a boy who lives in a bubble in Brooklyn. I'm hardly ever not near a throne, and I have hemorrhoids. So this time it's very deliberate. The risk outweighs the reward. Plus, the real dirty work will be done daily by four other little stool micromanagers: two Dulcolax, and one each of Colace and Senna.

God help me.

Meanwhile, I haven't been feeling too hot lately, which I thought would have put this week's rescheduled chemotherapy treatment at risk of being postponed. On Thursday morning I woke up to a familiar feeling often an early sign of a cold. Fuck no, I thought (because it burned to speak). I'd done everything in my powers to be careful and take it easy, giving my immune system whatever I thought it needed. Hell, I'd even gotten my libido back, but I was too paranoid to act on it. By the end of that day and into most of the weekend, it hurt to swallow, talk, cough, and tiny ice cubes lodged in the pores of my body seemed to melt in the middle of a few nights. 

Keeping me calm all weekend was one very key number: 97.7, my typical body temperature. Okay, good. Still no fever.

"It sounds like you have a sinus congestions," said my nurse this morning during the evaluation process prior to strapping me with chemo's transparent tentacles. Don't worry, she assured me, I'd still get the treatment even with a cold. Just not a fever.

Already I can feel the chemo starting to stress-test the foundation of my brain. It's pushing down on my head and my body, which seems to be counteracting the compression, is feeling tired. Even after a cup of coffee from the Starbucks around the cancer center, my eyelids still grew heavy for a moment on the subway ride back to Brooklyn.

And once again I'm starting to feel irritable.

When I got home, I dropped my cooler lunch bag on the floor and stepped out to the store for a few minutes. That's all the time my dog needed to somehow unzip it, pull everything out and devour the apple turnover I was saving for later. We had our first fight of the week. Then Mr. Darcy came home, trying to engage me with the kind of caring and thoughtful questions any normal person dreams about having in a relationship. I, however, could only stop him and explain, "Please, don't ask me about my day. Nothing's changed since this morning. I'll let you know if it does. Plus, it just makes me feel pathetic that nothing new has happened that would change my response."

And then, as usual after making such statements from high up my ass, I feel guilty.

This, in part, is why I have asked my mother to not visit. I'd rather have her not see me this way or see me behave this way. For now, I feel like I got this fight. But I promised her that if I should ever need her physically in my corner, I'll put her on the next flight out here. (Meanwhile, I know she loves hearing that I wear one of the several hand-knit scarves she has made for me to strut in for my appointments. It makes both of us feel like she's there with me.)

Still, it all starts today. For the next week and a half, I'll descend back into hell and slip into a chemo coma, despite how much I try to hold on to elements of David. But I know I'll fail. This part of the journey sets me up for just that. My job, however, seems to be to remember: It's not me, it's chemo.

On a possible upside, starting tomorrow I get to continue my chemotherapy treatment just a 10-minute walk from my stoop at a Sloan-Kettering satellite branch in Brooklyn. I'm hoping this will improve on my quality of life, with a shorter and more comfortable commute. Mondays will still take place on the Upper East Side, where my white blood cell count must first be checked.

Extra time to spend under the duvet in the morning. Extra time to heal at home in the afternoon. I just hope nothing at the Brooklyn center sends me running back to Manhattan.

I am so relieved - I have been panicking these past two weeks, worrying about my chances of getting into a summer program this year.

Who owns the research findings of university professors conducting research using university facilities -- the professor or the university? Why? If you were a university professor, how would you manage this?

The president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York is in a billion-dollar dispute with his former workplace, a cancer institute at the University of Pennsylvania, over accusations that he walked away with groundbreaking research and used it to help start a valuable biotechnology company.

In a lawsuit, the Leonard and Madlyn Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute at Penn described its former scientific director, Dr. Craig B. Thompson, as “an unscrupulous doctor” who “chose to abscond with the fruits of the Abramson largess.”

The dispute reflects the importance that academic research centers now place on turning discoveries made on their campuses into sources of revenue. Some have engaged in protracted legal battles to ensure compensation for their intellectual property. Yale, for example, won more than $1 million in compensation and legal fees in 2005 from a Nobel laureate it had accused of taking its technology.

But the lawsuit against Dr. Thompson has particularly high stakes, potentially affecting the reputations and finances of two of the country’s most prestigious cancer centers.

In a statement, Dr. Thompson denied the accusations made by the Penn institute. “It is unfortunate that the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute has chosen to go down this path,” he said.

And Dr. Thompson’s lawyer said that he would ask the court to dismiss the case, which also names as defendants the company that Dr. Thompson started, Agios Pharmaceuticals, and Celgene, a drug company that invested in Agios.

“There’s no real specific allegation here as to what research it is that he either failed to disclose to Penn or that Agios is actually using,” the lawyer, Allan J. Arffa, said in an interview.

Sloan-Kettering declined to comment, saying it was not a party to the lawsuit, which was filed in the United States District Court in Manhattan in December.

In the suit, the Abramson cancer institute, which has received more than $100 million from the philanthropist Leonard Abramson and his family, says that Dr. Thompson concealed his role in starting Agios, which has attracted investors with a potentially new way to treat cancer. The institute says Dr. Thompson’s actions deprived it of proceeds that could support future research, causing it damages that could exceed $1 billion.

Three people with knowledge of Dr. Thompson’s version of events, two of whom would speak only on condition of anonymity because of the litigation, said that the University of Pennsylvania knew about Dr. Thompson’s involvement with Agios and even discussed licensing patents to the company, though no agreement was reached.

“When you start a company like this, you want to try to dominate the field,” said Lewis C. Cantley, another founder of Agios and the director of the cancer center at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “The goal was to get as many patents as possible, and it was frustrating that we weren’t able to get any from Penn.”

Michael J. Cleare, executive director of Penn’s Center for Technology Transfer, declined to discuss whether negotiations had been held but said, “Yes, Penn knew about Agios.”

Susan E. Phillips, senior vice president for Penn Medicine, said that the suit had been filed not by the university but by the research institute, a separate entity. She said the university was investigating the accusations.

Penn is in a delicate position because Mr. Abramson is one of the university’s biggest donors, for whom its cancer center is named. He founded U.S. Healthcare, a managed care company that was sold to Aetna for nearly $9 billion in 1996.

The Abramson family declined to comment.

Dr. Thompson was hired in 1999 as scientific director of the research institute and in 2006 became director of the entire Abramson Cancer Center. He was named president of Sloan-Kettering in 2010.

Under its agreement with Penn, the Abramson cancer institute has certain rights to intellectual property arising from research it finances. But Mr. Arffa, the lawyer for Dr. Thompson, said he would argue in his motion that the research institute had no standing to sue since Dr. Thompson actually worked for the university.

Academic research institutes have gone to court before to contend that employees commercialized technology without giving them their share.

In 2005, for instance, a court ordered John B. Fenn, a former Yale professor, to pay the university $545,000 plus legal fees of about $500,000. The court said Dr. Fenn had licensed a molecular analysis technique, which won him a Nobel Prize, to a company he co-founded, without involving Yale.

In 2006, Dr. J. Milton Harris, a former professor at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and Nektar Therapeutics, a company with which he was associated, agreed to pay the university $25 million to settle accusations that he had secretly patented valuable drug formulation technology.

And in the 1990s, Petr Taborsky, a former student laboratory assistant at the University of South Florida, was convicted of theft and spent time on a prison chain gang after patenting a wastewater treatment method that he said he had invented on his own.

Agios, based in Cambridge, Mass., was founded in 2007 by Dr. Thompson, Dr. Cantley and Tak W. Mak of the University of Toronto. The 2008 news release announcing the company’s initial financing named Dr. Thompson as a founder.

The three scientists were leaders in the study of cancer metabolism, the way cells use sugar and other nutrients to make energy and material. The idea of trying to disrupt that metabolism to kill tumors clearly had appeal to investors. The company has raised about $260 million from investors, including $150 million from Celgene, an astonishing amount for a company with no drugs in clinical trials.

“I’ve started companies in the past, and I’ve just never seen anything like this,” Dr. Cantley said.

A crucial question, some patent law and technology transfer specialists said, could be whether Dr. Thompson provided patented technology to Agios or merely insights.

“If somebody goes out and forms a company and doesn’t take patented intellectual property — only brings knowledge, know-how, that sort of thing — we wouldn’t make any claims to it,” said Lita Nelsen, director of the technology licensing office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In its complaint, the Abramson institute does not cite any specific patents. It says Penn did not pursue the matter because Dr. Thompson had told the university that his role in Agios did not involve anything subject to the university’s patent policies. The lawsuit says the institute did not find out about Dr. Thompson’s role in Agios until late 2011.

Dr. Cantley said Agios was not pursuing technology from Dr. Thompson’s former laboratory. However, Dr. Thompson was a co-author on some scientific papers involving genes called IDH1 and IDH2, a focus of Agios’s research.