The final day at St. Jude for Larry Kun, MD, will be June 30, but in reality the esteemed radiation oncologist and the hospital’s clinical director has had one foot out the door since December. That’s when he and Donna, his wife of 45 years, moved to Dallas to be close to daughter Amy Pass, a pediatrician who has three young children.
So there will be no turning back for Kun, who has been commuting to Memphis during the week. By his reckoning, he is already late in embarking on his retirement.
“It was my promise to my wife and expectation that I would do that when I turned 65,” he said. “I turned 70 in March, so it’s five years later.”
A key factor in extending his stay at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital was his appointment in April 2013 to clinical director and executive vice president.
“It’s extremely difficult to step away from St. Jude,” he said. “It’s been a phenomenal ride and opportunity – both in contributions and realizations that I could never have imagined when I came to St. Jude in 1984.”
A Philadelphia native and son of a mechanical engineer and homemaker, Kun entered medical school at age 18, thanks to a five-year program offered by Penn State and Jefferson Medical College. He was at Penn State for only one year before he started med school.
“I wrote annually to the dean and pleaded with him to make it at least six years,” Kun said. “Five years was just too soon. It was by far the shortest program in the U.S.”
While he was at Jefferson, Kun was sent to Colorado Springs for an elective with Juan del Regato, a Cuba native who was one of the people who introduced radiation oncology into the United States. After residency training with del Regato, Kun spent two years at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and did a six-month fellowship in Rotterdam.
After a brief stay on the faculty at the University of Vermont, Kun joined a group for a new radiation oncology program with several other trainees of del Regato at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He was recruited as well by Don Pinkel, who had been the first medical director at St. Jude and had gone on to establish the Midwest Children’s Cancer Center. During his time in Milwaukee, Kun was urged by Pinkel to take a look at St. Jude. He did so in 1979 but didn’t make the commitment until five years later.
When he arrived in Memphis he did not expect he would still be here 32 years later.
Ideally, Kun would depart June 30 with a sense that all the things he wanted to see happen during his tenure had happened. But, as he noted, “I’m struggling to tie up a number of loose ends. The institution is a very dynamic one and continues to move along. As I step away, there will be some things that are finished and other things that are still on the horizon.”
Not that the doctor will be lacking in career achievements. His footprints will be especially large in two areas – radiation therapy and pediatric brain tumors, in particular his leadership role in establishing the Brain Tumor Program in Memphis, the national Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium and, having opened this past December, the world’s first proton therapy center for children.
When he came to St. Jude, “the greatest emphasis on radiation oncology was how it could be diminished or removed from certain aspects of treating pediatric cancer because of side effects that are particularly apparent in children who are more vulnerable to the effects of radiation,” he said.
But in part because of “dramatic leaps in technology,” he said, “quite the opposite has happened. Instead of seeing the role of radiation therapy diminished, with the exception of leukemia, its role has been enhanced and has been ever more safe in treating kids, and this is something one would never have expected in the 1980s.”
Of the proton therapy center, Kun said “with the support of the board and the CEO at the time, Bill Evans, we were able to develop what is now the most technically sophisticated proton center anywhere.”
Kun recalls that when he started at St. Jude, pediatric brain tumors, which account for about 20 percent of all pediatric cancers, were low on the priority list. That’s because, he said, “St. Jude just didn’t have the full spectrum of medical subspecialties necessary in neurosurgery, neuroimaging, neuropathology, neuropsychology and neuro everything.”
“One of the aspects in my recruitment was my interest in brain tumors and the commitment that St. Jude gave me to develop a small pediatric brain tumor program. And that was done literally with a handshake among the leadership of Le Bonheur and St. Jude and myself and the recruitment of a neurosurgeon, Alex Sanford, to help with that program.
“That developed from a commitment that we’d never see more than 12 to 18 kids a year to a program where we see about 180 a year, as one of the largest pediatric brain tumor programs in the world.”
Besides their daughter in Dallas, the Kuns have another daughter, Julie Alpert, in Columbus, Ohio. She is married to Seth Alpert, a pediatric urologist who trained in Memphis. They have two children, so the Kuns’ travel itinerary will include stops in Ohio.
“I’ve really committed to not committing myself for the next sixth months so I could do some traveling with my wife, which is long overdue,” Kun said.
Because of what he calls his “abbreviated time in college,” he would like to take some college courses “and at that point decide whether I want to get back into an administrative position in medicine in Dallas or continue to do some non-medical things.”
RELATED LINKS:
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium