Alison Wakoff Loren, Bone Marrow Transplant Doctor and Chief of Hematology/Oncology 

 

92-128. Alison Wakoff Loren

SPEAKERS

Alison Wakoff Loren, Will Bachman

 

Will Bachman  01:50

Hello and welcome to the 92 report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992 I’m your host, will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Allison Wakoff, Lauren, who many of you may have known in college as Allison Wakoff, Allison, welcome to the show. Thank you. Well, thanks for having me so, Allison, tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  02:18

Okay, well, I always knew that I wanted to be a doctor, and that is what I did. So graduated from Harvard and went straight off to St Louis, where I went to medical school at Washington University, joined by, actually, two of our classmates, Theo and Josh Cooper, we sweated it out for four years in St Louis together, I chose to specialize in internal medicine. Came to Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania, which is where I did my internal medicine residency training, and then did sub specialty fellowship training in hematology oncology, which is study of blood and cancer. Um, and I love working at Penn, and have actually been here ever since, um, I met my husband, David in medical school, we have three kids who are all in their early 20s, and they grew up in Philly. I try not to make fun of their Philadelphia accent, and I am now the chief of the Division of Hematology Oncology at the University of Pennsylvania, and I specialize in bone marrow transplantation, which is a curative therapy for blood cancer.

 

Will Bachman  03:55

When I look at my calendar for the coming day or coming week, there’s things that I’m get energy from, and there’s things that are a bit of a drag. Tell me a bit about as Chief of Hematology. What are the things that you know get you energized and excited and look forward to?

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  04:18

Um, I would say there are two things that I are the best parts of my job. For sure, the best part of my job is taking care of patients, and even though I do a lot of administrative work and some research, the best part is being able to help people who have just been diagnosed with leukemia. It’s a very scary diagnosis, I’m sure you can imagine, and offer them hope that they can get better and resume their lives. And I get so much out of my interactions with my patients. You get to talk to people in these really vulnerable places, and get to know them and their love. Loved ones and understand what their lives are like. And it is a really huge privilege to be able to get to know people in those situations, all different kinds of people living all different kinds of lives, and be able to try to help them. And the other great part of my job is in my administrative role, I do a lot of mentoring and career development for our trainees and our faculty, and helping people understand what what gets them up in the morning, what they love to do, and connect them with opportunities to do that is incredibly rewarding, and I feel really lucky to work in a division of people. There are about 140 faculty in my division whose entire lives are about curing cancer and blood diseases and mentoring and teaching others, and it’s a great privilege to help them help others, so I feel really lucky. I have a really wonderful job

 

Will Bachman  06:09

on that second part. Tell us a bit about obviously keeping it confidential and sanitized. But can you give us an example or two of situations where you have mentored someone and felt particularly proud of yourself for, you know, really helping someone come to some realization or solve some issue, or, just like helping them realize some weakness they could overcome. Or, you know, some kind of mentoring success stories that you’re proud of.

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  06:40

Sure. You know, it’s funny. Sometimes you don’t know that you’re having those moments until the person comes back and tells you, because, you know, you spend a lot of time doing it, you never really know what’s what lands and what matters to other people. Oh, you know what? And,

 

Will Bachman  06:56

yeah, this commercial break right there. Let me just take a moment there to just remind myself, as well as listeners, if someone has been a mentor to you and affected you in some way, high school, teacher, college professor, just make a note right this second on your Evernote whatever to tell them, because a lot of times mentors Don’t ever hear that, and it can be so powerful when someone, like, one out of 100 people that has been touched does reach out to mentor, like, five years later, whatever, and say, Oh, that was so helpful, that one thing that you said that was like an offhand remark. Anyway, I’m sorry I interrupted you. So, yeah. So no, it’s

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  07:36

a great point. And I think just to maybe amplify that a little bit just about gratitude in general. I think letting people know that they mean something to you, that they’ve helped you in some way. You know, the world isn’t super generous feeling these days sometimes, and so reminding everyone that we can make a difference for each other by showing that that warmth and gratitude is really important.

 

Will Bachman  08:01

Okay, I’m going to make a note to myself to do that today to some one person and every day. Okay, so you were saying you were going to give an example or two,

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  08:09

yeah, so I guess there’s two, what, maybe two or three interactions that come to mind really quickly. One is, I had a really talented woman in my fellowship who was an MD, PhD. So for your listeners who might not know about that, this is a very prolonged physician scientist career path. They spend sometimes seven or eight years training in both medical school and getting a science PhD, and then a very prolonged training pathway to get their sub specialty training. So it is a long road. And she came to our fellowship very interested in doing translational immunology in lung cancer, which is a really hard nut to crack, and she was in the lab for a couple of years, and was just really unhappy. And, you know, Penn is, like Harvard, a very high powered research institution. We it’s a pretty it is not an unwritten curriculum. It is a written and widely announced curriculum that you’re expected to become a researcher who’s going to cure cancer. You know, this is the big league. And so there’s some shame sometimes in people sort of saying, Gosh, I don’t think I really like this research thing that I’ve spent my whole life training to do, and where I really find my joy is in taking care of patients. And so we had a lot of talks about that. And, you know, in a I don’t mean to overstate this, going to make it seem like I’m some power tripper. I don’t mean it that way. I, you know, giving her permission to say I love this and not that she just became a different person, like you could sort of just see her like, Blossom and open up. And ended up doing additional training in palliative care and becoming a. Really wonderful clinician who practices in our community and takes really great care of patients. And every time that I see her, or that someone I know sees her, she will relay that story that helped her find like the joy in her work, and then it was what she thought it was going to be,

 

Will Bachman  10:23

the best that you can. What were the actual words that you said that helped open that

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  10:30

up? I think what I said to her was, be honest with yourself, and what I told her was, I want you to notice what what is when you sit down to work, what’s the first thing you do? Do you open up that manuscript that you’ve been slaving over? Do you revise that grant for the third time? Do you rush to the mouse colony cage to see who’s alive and who didn’t survive your treatment, or are you rushing to check your patient’s CAT scan and call them back with results? Are you like? What is it? What’s the first thing you do when you sit down to do your work? Because that tells you what, what, what you’re drawn to, like, that’s what you that’s the answer is that that’s what you love,

 

Will Bachman  11:21

revealed preference, right? Exactly, yeah, I love that question. What are you drawn to? What’s the first thing you turn to in the morning? I love that. Yeah. Share another example.

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  11:37

Well, this happened yesterday, a very somebody that I consider a dear friend who was a year behind me in residency and really talented physician, became a researcher studies Pharmacoepidemiology. Basically, he’s interested in viral hepatitis and and drug therapies for that disease and adherence to therapy. And he emailed me to say that he was leaving pen. He has a terrific new opportunity and an adjacent University, and he had just sent me an email to say, you know, you’ve been really important to me. We’ve been friends for a long time, and I wanted you to hear it from me. And I was really excited, so I called him, and he said, I can’t believe you’re calling me. He said, You know, you’re so busy. You’re the chief of this big division, you’ve got all these patients. And he said, the fact that you took like, five minutes to call me, he said that said a lot to him about the kind of like leader and mentor that he perceived me to be, and that that was something that shaped the way that he mentors and interacts with his colleagues, like being personally connected and again, I don’t mean to sound like patting myself on the back, but I was surprised, because I just felt like This is a wonderful person who’s a wonderful opportunity, and I care about him, but it was an interesting observation that he made, that that was something that he perceived to be unique and something that he was going to take with him moving forward as he continues to mentor others. That is such a nice story. He’s a great person. I’m sad that he’s leaving.

 

Will Bachman  13:23

Oh, and by the way, just editorial comment. I think that there is nothing wrong with patting yourself on the back. I think we, I think, I think we want to make that an okay thing. And, you know, I read this thing about this book on status games. I think it was. And it talked about how, you know, self promotion, being self promotional, is kind of looked down upon. But historically, that partly arose because people who already had status wanted to discourage people from, like, seeking status. So they tried to make it, oh, right, that’s so interesting. Yeah, so they didn’t want other people to go seek status by promoting themselves people who already had the status. So I think how dastardly on this show pat yourself on the back all day long. This is about patting yourself on the back, alright, fair enough. Sometimes no one else will. So that is really sweet that you know that, that you’re the kind of person that would make that call that’s so cool. I’d like to turn back to the first thing that you said, even before the mentoring piece you know about working with patients. And you said that, you know, it’s like this scary time for someone to find out they have leukemia. My God, I’d be so freaked out, and you have these kind of conversations. What? What have you learned about people from those sorts of conversations, those deep, scary conversations, where people probably revealing, you know, their fears and and you know concerns at that time in their. Lives, what? What do you know that you didn’t know when you were in med school?

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  15:07

Hopefully, I know a lot that I didn’t know in med school. I think probably the biggest thing that I have come to appreciate is that people always surprise you. They always surprise you. And just when you think you sort of know what to expect, there’s something else that that you wouldn’t have ever thought of. And you know what? What matters to people, the choices that they make. One of my most favorite interactions was with a patient. So I was an evolutionary biology major, which was super fun, spent a lot of time in the Museum of Comparative Zoology. So I’ll take my own personal commercial to say, if you’ve never been to the museum of Comparative Zoology, you should go. It is an amazing, beautiful place. And I so I was unfortunately delivering some sad news to a patient who had been a high school history teacher, I think. And I was telling him that his leukemia had come back and that we didn’t have a lot of treatment options. And he said, Do you think I’ll be well enough to go to the Galapagos Islands. And I was like, interesting question, when we sort of talked about what that would look like and the logistics, and I said, you know, the Galapagos Islands, like, obviously, that’s Darwin, right? So I was like, I thought I’d found this kindred spirit. I was like, oh, you know what? I’ve never been what is it that you want to see there? And he said to me, I’ve always wanted to go. Because I just have to understand how Darwin got it so wrong. Oh, my God. Like, Oh, expect that. And, you know, people have incredibly generous spirits. Sometimes people don’t behave their best when they’re scared, which I think maybe is a good lesson to keep remembering now and trying to remember to again, sort of hitting on this gratitude theme, it is amazing what what people feel grateful for, you know, things that we think a lot of us take for

 

Will Bachman  17:28

granted. And share some examples.

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  17:32

Um, I mean, it’s sort of nothing that you wouldn’t expect priorities like making it to somebody’s birthday or to a wedding or just something that’s personally important to them, decisions that people make because they know it matters to their loved ones, you know, and sometimes it can be decisions about stopping treatment because they see the treatments are taxing on their loved ones, and they sort of want to release them from that perceived burden decisions to continue treatment when they don’t want to, because they don’t want their loved ones to mourn them. I mean, the whole spectrum is, I mean, it’s just really humbling.

 

Will Bachman  18:27

How do people respond? What are the range of responses that you’ve seen when you have to deliver that sad news, like, Hey, we’re kind of out of treatment options.

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  18:40

You know might sound strange, but one of the advantages of taking care of people with cancer is that most people sort of know they’re in for an uphill climb. Yeah, and it’s very rare, although it certainly happens that people are surprised, and so it’s a little different from a really shocking, unexpected death or prognosis. And one thing that I learned is so I mentioned earlier that the main thing I specialize in is a type of treatment called a bone marrow transplant, which is very intensive but curative intent therapy. And I learned early on that people didn’t really think about like they sort of do. They could have complications from the transplant or maybe not survive the transplant, but the idea that their cancer could come back after transplant was something that they hadn’t really considered. And so again, something you learn the hard way is to sort of try to lay some groundwork ahead of time so that those hard conversations later are a little less shocking, and finding a way to do that in a way that still offers hope while still grounding the conversation. And the realities of what could happen is really hard. And you know, just like anything like you’re, you know you never, you know you’re, you’re almost, it’s not, you’re not performing when you meet a patient. But there is an element of, you know, you only have one time to say things the right way to a patient. Well, sure you’re performing right. I mean, we are not in a disingenuous way, I guess is what I mean. I

 

Will Bachman  20:31

would say that almost the definition of being a professional is that we are performing right now, it doesn’t have to be inauthentic, necessarily, but we’re not like bringing our crabby, you know, lazy self to work, right? We’re putting on a professional role. I particularly felt that when I was in the Submarine Force, you know, that was a performance when you’re off to the deck, bringing a submarine to periscope depth. Here you have all these lines to say. So, no, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying. It’s a performance, you know, you know, whatever you feel that day you set that aside. It’s emotional labor to you know, provide that, that you know, the the doctor that the patient needs to see, right?

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  21:19

Yeah, that’s true. It is true

 

Will Bachman  21:23

anyway. And I think I’m sorry, no,

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  21:25

1. I think it’s a really it’s a really interesting point. I hadn’t really thought of it in that way, but I do spend a lot of time trying to meet patients where they are. And I think probably in medicine, we probably find less alarming ways to say performing, but then really, you’re right. I mean, that is what we’re doing, right? We’re trying to when I meet a patient, I’m constantly, like, assessing. I’m looking at them. Are they with me? Are they making eye contact? What about their partner who’s here in the room with them? Like, what is the vibe in this room? Are they following me? Do they believe me? Are they getting on with the plan, or am I getting skepticism or a lot of questions, you know, are they engaged? Are they just terrified and can’t absorb anything? You know, there’s a lot of interplay there, and so I hadn’t really thought of it as a performance, per se, but you’re right, there is an element of, like, there’s an you know, you’re talking, they’re the audience, and you have to sort of just what you said, give, give them what they need be the be the doctor that they need in that moment. And that can change. Certainly changes patient to patient, and sometimes it changes visit to visit.

 

Will Bachman  22:41

Yeah, I’m curious. This is almost like a little bit, maybe kind of sort of rude to ask, but I’m curious, like the economics of medicine suggests, to me, as just an outsider, that certain types of medicine, like primary care, where they have to crank through and see 11 patients an hour, just to make the economic squirt, because the payments aren’t that great, meaning that they can’t spend that much time with you. But it seems to me that, like cardiology, are they gonna do heart surgery or cancer like it’s much bigger dollar payments for the actual like bone marrow transplant, which means that you can probably spend more time with patients, is that, is that kind of a fair reading of of how things are? Yes,

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  23:26

I think that is a fair reading of how things are. I think the sum of it is that, you know, everyone expects that if you have cancer, you should have time with the with the team, and, you know, understanding the treatment. I guess I’ll also say that even though, I guess I’ll just be blunt, even though the margins are higher when you’re taking care of cancer patients as opposed to primary care patients, it’s still in the system’s interest for you to see as many patients as possible. Oh, interesting, right? Just because you’re making more per patient doesn’t mean you should see fewer, sort of how that my bosses see it and so and I have been criticized, or I would say, maybe, let’s say I’ve gotten feedback about spending too much time with patients, okay, which I think is crazy. Yeah,

 

Will Bachman  24:16

interesting. Okay. I mean, at some point the economics. I mean, it has to be, you know, be able to pay the bills for the hospital. Yeah,

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  24:25

but, but you’re right, and I will say that I feel very lucky that I’m able to do that. And there are certainly days I run an hour behind in clinic, and those are, it’s horrible feeling to know that you’re keeping anxious people waiting, and it’s not good anyway, but it’s important. So

 

Will Bachman  24:43

we talked about mentoring, we talked about patient care. What? What’s something in your research that you’re particularly proud of? No pat yourself on the back here. I mean, you must have done some, you know, impressive produce, some impressive stuff. Because they promoted you up to like the head of the

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  25:03

whole department in spite of it. But yeah, so this is actually a great I love talking about this. So something that many people don’t think very much about is the fact that cancer treatments can harm reproductive capacity, so people can become infertile from cancer treatments, and that’s something that oncology teams don’t talk about very much, partly because we’re so focused on the cancer and we’re not reproductive endocrinologists, so we don’t always feel comfortable answering all the questions. And so it just doesn’t get addressed very much. And so there’s a really important focus in oncology on making sure that all patients are counseled about the reproductive the reproductive impact of their treatments and the reproductive options to engage in fertility preservation before they start their cancer treatments. And for men, that’s sperm banking. And for women, that’s, or, I should say, people who identify who, people who are born with testes, is sperm banking. And for people who are born with ovaries, it is either egg or embryo freezing, or anyway, it’s, it’s really important to talk about it and to get those treatments underway before starting cancer treatment, and it’s pretty well recognized for people who take care of people with breast cancer, but for people with blood cancers, it’s usually an emergency. They don’t usually have the ability to wait a couple of weeks to do all those things. And so it’s been a little bit of like an underrepresented part of an underrepresented part of oncology care. And so I’ve been really fortunate to be able to speak and advocate and think about fertility preservation and people with cancer with a particular lens around people with blood cancers, which represents sort of a special population in that crowd

 

Will Bachman  27:02

I see so we

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  27:05

are this unintentional timing, but the new guidelines for fertility preservation are about to come out any day now from the large cancer organization. I was lucky to be able to co chair that effort and just interested in cancer survivorship in general as sort of a side hustle.

 

Will Bachman  27:24

Okay, so even if it’s like an emergency with you, you want to counsel the person and see if there’s anything that can be done in that short period of time to help preserve fertility.

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  27:37

Yeah, that’s exactly right. And actually just talking about it, even if they don’t have time to do anything, has been shown to reduce distress and decision regret for people after cancer treatment. And so even if there are not, there’s not time to engage in any fertility preservation options beforehand, it still helps to talk about it. And what’s also really cool, and this is definitely not my wheelhouse, but our colleagues in reproductive science are doing amazing research to extend options for reproductive care, both before and after cancer treatment. So that’s exciting too, to be able to inform oncology clinicians about that and let people know that there’s lots of options to advocate for insurance coverage for these treatments, right? We pay for we pay for wigs, we pay for breast conservation therapy or, you know, so why shouldn’t we pay for fertility care? It’s often not. It’s quite expensive, as many people may know, and it’s often not covered because it’s viewed as, quote, elective, but you have cancer and you’re about to get chemotherapy, I don’t think people would agree that it’s elective. Yeah,

 

Will Bachman  28:49

I wanted to give sort of just open the window we’ve been focused on your career, if you want to share anything about your your life outside of work.

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  28:57

Uh, sure. Um, I, might my kids are awesome. I’m sure everybody says that my I have a daughter who was a history major at Brown and is now working at the Amherst College Library. My My middle child, my older son, is about to graduate from Penn. He is thinking about medical school, applying to mph programs right now. And my youngest is my younger. My youngest is a boy also, and he’s at Bates College in Maine. Loves the snow, loves the cold. I fear he may never come home. And they are smart and fun and interesting and really inspire me to live better. I will say my daughter especially has really inspired me to think about women in the workplace. She I remember right after I started this position, I was talking with her about. Out, I had a couple of men in my division who needed to be retained. They had gotten competing offers elsewhere, and we were trying to retain them. They were really valuable to our missions. And, you know, part of the retention is to give them a raise. And you know, then you have equity problems. And I was sort of bemoaning this to her and saying, you know, these men seem to always be out there interviewing and getting offers, and this is, this is why men end up getting paid more, is because they seek out these opportunities and then they leverage them. And she said, Well, if you know the women aren’t going to do that, why don’t you just pay them more? Like, why do you make them do that? Like, that’s a really good question. And of course, my youngest son said, Well, you know, women, women get paid less than men, then you should just only hire women because they’re cheaper. So, you know, these little peacock observations always keep me thinking. I started running after college, for sure, and have been running pretty regularly for the last, I don’t know, 10 or 15 years. Do a bunch of races every year. Tell us about that. I’m not that fast, but I like it. Um, yeah, I have to get up really early, and I’m not a morning person. Um, my closest friend in college was a morning person. So very much to her chagrin, we would be trying to meet for our 830 or go class, and I was always late. But now I’m up at 530 most days to get my run in before I go to work. Um, is that a great town to run in, by the way, if anyone’s in Philadelphia, yeah.

 

Will Bachman  31:48

Is that a true medical thing? Is there such a thing like medically as morning people and night people? And yes,

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  31:53

absolutely, yes. Yeah. People have their own internal clocks, and some people have more energy in the morning and at night, I’m kind of a mid afternoon person.

 

Will Bachman  32:07

Is there, is there like a medical test for that, or is it just see when people are happiest waking up? I mean, is there like a way to say, Oh yes, you know, we looked at your genes and you are a morning person, or we did a blood test and you’re a morning

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  32:21

person? Yeah, that’s such a good question. I mean, I’m not a sleep medicine specialist, although I have a good friend who is, and I don’t think we’re at a point where we can look at your genes and say, This is your optimal time of day, but we’re probably not all that far off from that. There’s really interesting research into sort of the biology of the circadian clock and understanding people’s optimal sleep wake times and when they’re most productive. But I think right now, we’re pretty much at the empiric like, sea bass wake up.

 

Will Bachman  32:51

Like, when are you happiest getting up? Okay, yes. And what’s your where’s your favorite running path? Where do you like to run? And so

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  33:00

there’s a really terrific so the Schuylkill River, which you have to live in Philly for at least 10 years to learn how to pronounce, that has a really great path that extends. They’ve been building it and building it over the years I’ve lived here. So it now extends from Center City all the way out to Valley Forge, which I don’t run that far. That’s probably 2530 miles, but it’s, it’s a great running path, and it runs all along the river and then a tow path, and it’s just a great spot.

 

Will Bachman  33:31

And are you a music person, an audiobook person, a podcast person, or just a silence kind of running in this Yeah, I

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  33:39

1. They call us silent killers, but I I run mostly with a good friend who’s a also a leukemia doctor at a different institution. But when she’s injured or unavailable, I run alone and I don’t listen to anything. That’s my time like I spent all day talking to people I spent all night talking to, you know, kids doing work like this is my time to just meditate. It’s really helpful.

 

Will Bachman  34:08

So just go with your own thoughts. Just run along, okay, yeah,

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  34:13

it’s also great, by the way, to get to know other cities like, you know, when I travel, right? I just throw my sneakers in my bag. I don’t need to figure out where the nearest gym is, and I can go run a neighborhood. And it’s kind of cool to see. It’s a nice way to get to know other

 

Will Bachman  34:27

places. That is so true, and you are able to actually run with a friend most days. So you guys get and that sort of good forcing mechanism you don’t want to correct

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  34:37

keeps me accountable. That’s for sure, those 530 wake ups aren’t always so joyful.

 

Will Bachman  34:46

Tell me about any courses or professors or activities that you’re involved in at Harvard that continue to resonate with you.

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  34:55

Um, I think that you know i. I was lucky enough to take some a couple classes with Stephen Jay Gould and I took a biology class that was co taught by Stephen Jay Gould and Dick Lewontin, who just recently passed away. They were. I mean, just such incredibly intelligent, insightful I talk about people who can integrate biology with History and Sociology and politics and really, you know, make science a part of the fabric of life. Was so it’s just so inspiring. I don’t know if you’ve read or had the privilege before he passed away to listen to Steven J gold speak, but he’s just a brilliant, brilliant writer, brilliant

 

Will Bachman  35:50

the core class. Yeah, it was great. Oh, right. And I read a bunch of years too.

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  35:55

Yeah, yeah. Really amazing. And, and Dick Lewontin was a really special, inspiring scientist. He I remember early in the class, so he was really opposed to the idea that genetics could determine behavior, right? He was all about that, like we all have the capacity to be and to change. And he he used to say that the two traits that that breed most true from generation to generation are politics and religion, right, which you would never argue that there’s a gene for that. And so he was really against sort of deterministic you know that your genes determine your fate. And I remember him holding up this behavioral genetics textbook and describing the authors as thorough going villains. And I just thought that was awesome. So that was really great and fun. And just mind expanding, and then maybe somewhat unexpected, I took act 10 as a senior, I think I was definitely the oldest person in her room, except for the TAs. And it was really fun, and I sort of had this moment of like, oh, maybe I’m making a mistake and I need to go back. But of course, it was a senior, so no way I was going to convince my parents to do another three years of undergrad to change my major. But I really appreciated that class and just learning different ways of thinking about it, Matt, I still think about some of the don’t ask me, because I will definitely misstate it, but I still think about some of the things I learned

 

Will Bachman  37:30

there. Yeah, everyone should take economics. Everyone needs to understand that.

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  37:35

Yeah,

 

Will Bachman  37:38

any activities you were involved in in college. That still means something to you.

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  37:42

Yeah, you know, I volunteered at the Mission hill after school program, and I really, I learned a lot from that, actually, and I really appreciated the opportunity to get to know the kids and the families there, I will say you might remember the Charles Stewart shooting that happened right around that time. So this was it was horrible. There’s actually a great podcast about it, but it was basically a guy who was with his pregnant wife. They had just left a birthing class at Brigham and Women’s and claimed that they were held up and robbed and shot. And it turned out, and it was like this terrible manhunt. You know, the Boston cops sort of emptied out mission hill because it happened right there. I was, right at the Medical Campus, and I’m oversimplifying what it turned out that he himself was the one who perpetrated the crime, and so it was like this, just terribly heart wrenching, you know, very sad, obviously, but then just the sort of racism that that just opened up, and the pain of the people who lived in that neighborhood, having worked there, it was, like, really painful, I don’t know, just it was a really painful chapter. I think it happened right after we graduated. I’d have to Google the exact date, but anyway, so I worked, I worked there, but that was part of Phillips Brooks House. I will say one thing that I was surprised when I got to Harvard was that, you know, our classmates and our schoolmates are so talented, so you don’t really have the chance to, like, oh, just try out for the school play. Maybe I’ll write for the paper. It’s like, everything is like, if you are not a pro, then just forget it. And so it’s not a very it’s not unless you just happen to have really raw, innate talent at something you’ve just never tried before. It’s not a good place to really explore. I felt a lot of extracurriculars. I found that really intimidating. Yeah,

 

Will Bachman  39:57

I am. I. Freshman I was exploring. And freshman year, I had never, I played the violin in high school. I was terrible, right? But I was like, Okay, I’m gonna, I’ll learn how to sing. And I went and tried to, like, join the choir, and took a few lessons, and I was just terrible, terrible thing. And then I ended up, I ended up joining the crimson and I guess I was good at, I mean, I mean, I didn’t know how to take pictures at all, but, but they were desperate for for people. Everybody wants to be a, you know, reporter, right? You know. But they were desperate, I guess, for photographers. So they had a very good training program for and learn how to take pictures in a dark room and print, print black and white photos and stuff. So I guess that was one place you could slide in without a lot of high school training. But I guess you found it, you know, I but I hear your point like I have tried out for some plays I’d never acted in high school. And for Pete’s sakes, you know, there’s like, Matt Damon, and there’s, you know, Meredith acting in play. No, okay,

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  40:58

yeah, yeah, I played the piano for like, 12 or 13 years before I got to college, and I sort of thought I’d keep it up. And, you know, you go to the practice rooms and you’re like, thinking it out, and you hear some like, Concerto in the next room. Even just in the practice rooms, it was intimidating.

 

Will Bachman  41:13

Walked by Adam’s House, and even outdoors in the street, they’d be like, Joshua Redmond playing in the practice room

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  41:19

right, exactly

 

Will Bachman  41:22

even scales that got Allison for listeners that wanted to learn more about your research, maybe follow up with you. Where would you point them online?

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  41:36

Yeah, that’s a good question. So I mentioned to you before we started, that I don’t have a social media presence. It’s mostly because I’m not organized enough to check it all that often. But I would say that certainly, like our faculty homepage at the University of Pennsylvania, the guidelines and the work that I do for fertility preservation, you can find on a lot of the patient oriented websites, the Leukemia Lymphoma Society, bone marrow transplant patient, patient websites. The American Society for Clinical Oncology is the guideline organization that is publishing the research that we do. So those sorts of places I’m Google able, I guess is what I’d say. All right,

 

Will Bachman  42:19

so use, use your search engine. Allison, thank you so much for joining today in this wonderful conversation.

 

Alison Wakoff Loren  42:26

I really enjoyed talking with you. Well, thanks so much. Thanks for doing this project. You.