A conversation with Craig Thompson.

Craig Thompson, President and CEO of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, is a medical oncologist and immunologist who has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of how cells — from B and T cells to stem cells and cancer cells — survive and replicate. See the full interview at https://www.jci. org/videos/cgms to hear Thompson’s (Figure 1) stories about being a remedial reader, the future of cancer research and therapy, and leadership lessons learned from Watership Down. JCI: What were you like as a kid? Thompson: I grew up as a military brat. My dad was a career officer in the Coast Guard, and so I spent my life growing up on or near military bases. We started out in the midwest and moved to Boston, where I had my first science experience at Woods Hole, when my dad ran the Coast Guard base in Falmouth, Massachusetts. I learned to swim at the Woods Hole beach and had my first science lecture in the first grade there. We then moved to Hawaii and then many other parts of the US. I became quite open to new situations and new opportunities as a result of my upbringing. I was not the best student when I was in elementary school, nor was I a very attentive young man. The good news for me was I was pretty good at math, and so that always carried me through, but I was a horrible reader. JCI: At some point along the way, you kindled an interest in science. Thompson: Before high school, we moved to outside Boston. My parents put my sister and me in an experimental public school funded by the Ford Foundation that was hooked up to MIT. I was put in a special computer homeroom and that exposed me to the science nerds of the school, and it turns out I was one. Almost all of us that were in that group went into science in some way. But when I grew up, one of the ways you learn as a military brat to break in, is that sports are the leveler. I was lucky enough to go to Dartmouth and play two sports there, which were the two sports I liked best in high school. I played soccer in the fall, and I did white water kayaking in the spring, which had just been made an Olympic sport. I loved working in the chemistry lab, and I thought I would go on to a doctoral degree in chemistry. In 1974, the National Science Foundation stopped giving out doctoral fellowships in chemistry; everybody thinks today is the only time funding from federal government was withdrawn, but they decided we had enough chemists