I’m a patient advocate working with a team of international researchers from the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Sweden, and the United States called PROMINENT. I’m motivated to work with the team, because I was exposed to an excessive amount of benzene during the 1973 Arab oil embargo. I worked long shifts pumping gasoline for Chevron, when cars were lined up around the block and for days afterwards, I felt light-headed. Twenty-two years later, I was diagnosed with tongue cancer.
Similarly, the affluent citizens of Santa Clara County in California didn’t know their benzene exposure from high tech clean room leakage would kill some of them years later. And we don’t know now which citizens in East Palestine, Ohio will contract cancer in the future, after being exposed to chemicals containing benzene, which is found in gasoline, plastics, synthetic fibers, dyes, detergents, drugs, and pesticides. Benzene is a documented carcinogen.
Google defines a carcinogen as a substance capable of causing cancer in living tissue. PROMINENT defines a carcinogen as something that causes cancer by two mechanisms: one is mutagenesis (the process by which an organism’s deoxyribonucleic acids (DNA) changes, resulting in abnormal cell growth) and the second is by promotion (driving cancer growth without causing mutations)
PROMINENT received a five-year grant from the Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Institute in the US, the two of the world’s most important cancer research funders, to better understand the role of promotion which could help explain why a similar exposure to a carcinogen can cause cancer in one person but not the other.
Tongue and neck cancer repurposed my attention away from my gas engineering career to becoming a fulltime cancer survivor and patient advocate, which led me to joining the American Association of Cancer Research. Because of my affiliation with AACR, I received an invitation to join the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group-American College of Radiology Imaging Network (ECOG-ACRIN). Later, after surviving prostate cancer, I helped start an African American Prostate Support Group in Oakland, California. I offer these variety of advocacy experiences to support PROMINENT achieve its progress in cancer research through global collaboration.