LAS VEGAS -- As many times as Dr. Nam Dang
slipped in and out of Las Vegas for medical conferences over the
years, it never occurred to him that he'd want to live here.
Like many highly regarded professionals who are not involved
or interested in the gambling or resort industries, Dang never
gave Sin City much thought as a place to work. The 42-year-old
assumed he'd take the MD and PhD he earned over 18 years at
Harvard, settle in at a renowned cancer institution, and call
it a career.
That plan took a sudden, sharp, and -- to his mentors and
colleagues at Harvard and elsewhere -- startling turn when the
up-and-coming lymphoma researcher and clinician announced last
year he was giving up a cushy post at top-ranked M.D. Anderson
Cancer Center in Houston after just six years to join the not-yet-existent
Nevada Cancer Institute in Las Vegas.
Vegas? The region's reputation in medicine, let alone cancer
care, is lackluster at best. It's home to just one small medical
school and a medical community that has been humiliated in recent
years by two successive governors' decisions to go to California
for their prostate cancer surgeries.
''I was surprised he was leaving M.D. Anderson and going to
a place that had nothing going for it," recalled Dr. George
Canellos, chief of medical oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer
Institute in Boston and one of Dang's key influences in research.
But that challenge captured Dang's imagination when the nascent
center in Las Vegas began to form and its director, Dr. Nicholas
Vogelzang, began courting him to be chief of hematological malignancies.
The announcement in 2003 that Vogelzang, then director of the
esteemed University of Chicago Cancer Research Center, would
head up the Nevada Cancer Institute rocked the cancer care establishment,
bringing instant credibility to the project.
After six visits to Nevada, including numerous meetings with
Vogelzang and the institute's CEO, Heather Murren, as well as
tours of the Las Vegas Valley, Dang finally tendered his resignation
at Anderson.
''I did not know about Vegas in terms of the city," Dang said.
His desk is already cluttered with journals and printouts of
studies in his office at the institute's first building, a 142,000-square-foot
facility that opened in September. ''Like most people I thought,
'Oh, Vegas is a place where there are a lot of hotels, that's
all.' But there is a growing community here, and after I had
talked to everybody and saw that the commitment here is very
serious, I decided there's a real potential to achieve what
they want to do."
What they want to do, Murren says, is nothing less than build
a center that can compete with Dana-Farber, Anderson, and other
elites. There's now just one building on the empty west end
of the valley sitting in the shadow of mountains that lead to
California. But the area is slated for rampant residential growth
and an expanded freeway in coming years, and Murren hopes to
add 60 acres to their 6-acre holdings.
In coming to Las Vegas, Dang and others bought the sales pitch
Murren and Vogelzang laid out: Here's a unique opportunity to
start something from scratch and make a significant impact on
a community.
''There are few places where [scientists like Dang] can do
their day jobs and have such a resounding impact on the people
who live around them," Murren says. ''If I live in New York
City and I'm a cancer researcher, it's great, it's wonderful,
but does it really change the whole paradigm of what New York
City is all about if I exist there and do my job there? Probably
not. But if I move to Nevada? Absolutely. This matters to the
local community -- a lot."
Even so, Dang said it was difficult to explain his decisions
to colleagues in Houston.
''When I told my boss, he said, 'Can I give you more money?
Can I give you more space?' " recalled Dang, who declined to
discuss how his salaries in Houston and Nevada compared. ''And
I said, 'It's not about that.' "
Dang -- whose family rushed out of Vietnam a week before the
fall of Saigon in 1975, when he was 13, and settled in Texas
-- left behind his parents, who lived a block away in Houston,
and his sister, also a doctor, who lived five blocks away. Dang
and his wife, Ann, have two children, ages 1 and 3, which meant
giving up the support of his family in raising the children
as well as leaving Houston's large Vietnamese population.
Dang's background has influenced every aspect of his life.
His desire to be a doctor started when he was a boy in Saigon
watching the war's dead and wounded being brought through the
streets. He wanted to help.
And he met his wife, Ann, who is also Vietnamese, at Harvard.
He was a first-year medical student who had been recruited to
translate for the family of a Vietnamese girl dying of cancer
and her doctors at Dana-Farber. The work took up too much time,
so he sought help from Ann, a pre-med freshman. The couple bonded
over the experience of tag-teaming as translators for six months,
until the child died.
Ann, who is a cardiologist, supported the decision to move
to Vegas, as did Dang's other mentors, such as Dr. Robert Mayer
of Dana-Farber.
''I think people at Nam Dang's point must decide whether they
want to be one of many at a large institution or whether they
want to blaze some new pathways," said Mayer, Dana-Farber's
director of gastrointestinal oncology and director of the hematology-oncology
fellowship program in which Dang served during the 1990s. ''In
the lymphoma world, he's somebody who is growing very rapidly.
I imagine he'll have an enormous influence over what clinical
lymphoma work goes on and be very influential in the resident
and teaching programs."
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