The Wall Street Journal-20080119-Remembrances
Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080119
Remembrances
JUDAH FOLKMAN (1933-2008)
Doctor Pioneered New Cancer Treatments
Every Friday at 9 a.m., Judah Folkman could be found in the 12th- floor conference room of the Karp Family Research Laboratories, across the street from Children's Hospital Boston. The occasion was the weekly lab meeting for members of the vascular-biology program that Dr. Folkman directed, but frequently it was standing room only. There were doctors who wanted to discuss how Dr. Folkman's theories might help their patients, scientists visiting from other labs around the world and company executives interested in doing business.
Everyone sat in the shadow of the honors and plaques that covered every inch of the conference-room walls, accolades attesting to Dr. Folkman's singular role in developing the idea that cancer can be stopped by cutting off the blood vessels tumors need to keep growing.
Even as the idea he proposed in 1971 became widely accepted, Dr. Folkman continued to push controversial new ideas. In recent years, he began arguing that cancer should be treated more like heart disease. Just as a cardiologist doesn't wait for someone to have a heart attack in order to prescribe statin drugs, Dr. Folkman envisioned a time when oncologists wouldn't wait for a tumor to show up on an imaging scan. Instead, he and collaborators were working to find early indications that the disease was under way. He thought treatment with antiangiogenic drugs -- ones that aim to cut off a tumor's blood supply -- might nip the early disease in the bud.
At a meeting with patient advocates in November 2006, Dr. Folkman told them that, one day, "it will be considered negligence to wait to see a tumor before you treat it."
The work of Dr. Folkman, who died at 74 this past Monday of an apparent heart attack while traveling to give a lecture, helped create the antiangiogenesis field, which today includes big-selling drugs such as Genentech Inc.'s Avastin. Despite his immersion in research, he remained accessible to patients, fielding more than 50 calls a week from people who had heard about him and sought his help.
In February 2005, Michael Dodd, the parent of a child who had survived the rare childhood cancer neuroblastoma, showed up at Dr. Folkman's office unannounced, daughter in tow, and ended up brainstorming with Dr. Folkman for two hours. The doctor entertained the little girl during the conversation by allowing her to play with the overhead projector.
Two weeks after that meeting, Dr. Folkman prepared a detailed proposal based on their conversation, suggesting that his lab do research on potential markers in the blood and urine of children with neuroblastoma that might one day be used to predict the cancer's recurrence. He offered to fund the research from his lab's discretionary funds because he deemed it "too important to wait," recalls Dr. Dodd. Eventually, this work became part of a broader project on a test to pick up very early tumor recurrence.
At those Friday lab meetings, Dr. Folkman cajoled his young researchers to work faster and to never lose sight of the fact that even if they were doing research on mice, the ultimate goal was to cure patients. One Friday, after returning from speaking at a professional meeting of ophthalmologists, he gleefully reported that there had been 500 abstracts about angiogenesis in the eye presented at the meeting, clearly enjoying the vindication that had come after so much skepticism about his ideas.
Even so, he remained willing to tell a joke at his own expense. At one meeting, he told of his granddaughter remarking that "boys are silly" because a boy in her class insisted that girls couldn't be doctors. As Dr. Folkman recounted it, he gently chided the girl that she shouldn't build an entire theory on a single example. "My wife then reminded me that I do that all the time," he laughed.
---
CARL KARCHER (1917-2008)
A Higher-End Take on Burgers and Fries
Inspired by McDonald's, Carl Karcher carved a niche in fast food with his slightly upscale burger-and-fries eateries.
Placemats at his Carl's Jr. restaurants told of the Ohio farm boy who made his way to Anaheim, Calif., to heft sacks of grain at his uncle's feed store. In 1941, he bought a hot-dog stand with $311 borrowed against his Plymouth Super Deluxe. He soon expanded to three stands, then a drive-in barbecue joint called Carl's.
It was after being introduced to burger automation at the McDonald brothers' revolutionary San Bernardino hamburger stand that he hit on the idea of opening Carl's Jr. In 1956, Mr. Karcher opened his first two fast-food burger outlets in Southern California. His restaurants were among the first to offer salad bars and grilled-chicken sandwiches. But other ideas were less successful. Several efforts to domesticate south-of-the-border cooking over the years ended in failure, including one called Taco de Carlo's (continuing his idiosyncratic punctuation).
Carl's Jr. settled into a familiar format, a notch or two above the competition in service and price. Restaurants were plush for fast food of the day, including carpeting and padded seats. Customers stood in line to order, but food was brought to the table by a server. The chain grew to 306 outlets by 1981 and sold its first franchises in 1984.
Mr. Karcher grew into a local eminence, known as "Mr. Orange County" for his involvement in charities and Republican politics. A conservative Catholic, Mr. Karcher was in the habit of handing out Bible verses along with burger coupons. After he supported a failed 1978 California initiative that would have banned homosexuals from teaching in school, many in the gay community for years boycotted what they called "bigot burgers." But more frequently, Mr. Karcher's public face was the good-natured proprietor who appeared in Carl's Jr. television spots, conversing with the chain's iconic yellow Happy Star.
The picture grew more complicated after Mr. Karcher took his company public in 1981. Leery of giving up control, he quarreled with his board. In 1989, he settled an insider-trading case with the Securities and Exchange Commission over trades family members made in advance of an announcement of an earnings decline. He was ousted as chairman in 1993 after a battle with the board over offering menu items from the Green Burrito chain at Carl's Jr. restaurants. Green Burrito's controlling shareholder had promised to give Mr. Karcher a $6 million loan to prop up his rocky personal finances, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.
Mr. Karcher was later reinstalled as chairman emeritus and for a time resumed his role as the chain's amiable TV pitchman. But it subsequently turned to edgier advertising aimed at young men. In 2003, an ad with Playboy founder Hugh Hefner marveling over Carl's Jr.'s bounteous menu featured the tagline, "Because some guys don't like the same thing night after night."
Today, there are 1,121 Carl's Jr. restaurants in the U.S. The company Mr. Karcher founded has 3,036 franchised or company-operated restaurants world-wide, including the Hardee's chain. Mr. Karcher, who died Jan. 11 at 90, had 12 children, and several Karcher family members hold high positions at the company.
As in years gone by, the current specialty of Carl's Jr. is a menu item that's a bit more elaborate and pricier than what the bigger chains offer. While "value meal" combos at McDonald's and Burger King usually come in the $4 range, the Six Dollar Burger lineup at Carl's Jr. offers burgers with ingredients like guacamole or portobello mushrooms.
-- Stephen Miller
---
RICHARD KNERR 1925- 2008
Fad Factory's Contributor of Fun
Richard Knerr and his high-school buddy, Arthur "Spud" Melin, founded Wham-O Manufacturing Co. in 1948 in his family's garage in Alhambra, Calif. At first they made recreational weapons: crossbows, boomerangs, blow guns, throwing knives. Later, they branched out into toys, most spectacularly Hula Hoops, which dazzled the nation in 1958.
Mr. Knerr, who died Jan. 14 at age 82, was Wham-O's president. Spud and Rich, as they were universally called, liked to mix it up in the office with toy guns and Super Ball tossing contests.
From hoops to Frisbees to Super Balls -- each of which sold in the hundreds of millions -- Wham-O's biggest hits always were about active, outdoor fun. Its best products transcended trivial toys and verged on the profound. They were simple shapes -- a disk, a ring, a sphere -- that behaved in unexpectedly wonderful ways.
But the fad business was unstable. A 1965 page-one story in The Wall Street Journal opened by noting: "The ball and the company are quite alike."
"We don't make big red fire trucks and bicycles," Mr. Knerr told the Journal. "We're always out for what's new and different."
Wham-O's failures were legion, from the "Instant Fish" home-hatching aquarium to a do-it-yourself bomb shelter that Mr. Knerr conceded was essentially a pile of bricks. But lesser hits kept the company afloat: Silly String, Slip 'n Slide, SuperElasticBubblePlastic.
In 1982, they sold the company to Kransco Manufacturing Inc. for $12 million. "If Spud and I had to say what we contributed, it was fun," Mr. Knerr told the Los Angeles Times in 1994.
-- Stephen Miller
---
Email [email protected]
