Philip Di Saia, MD, wants to make one thing perfectly clear: "Cancer is a solvable problem." Few people in Southern California--or the USA, for that matter--are in a better position to know than he. Based at the University of California at Irvine, in Orange, Dr. Di Saia is deputy director of the UCI Medical Center's Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and director of the Division of Gynecologic Oncology there. He also holds the Dorothy Marsh Chair in Reproductive Biology and is a professor of radiology, as well as the past president of the UCI Medical Group. He's also president of the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology and chair of the National Cancer Institute's Gynecologic Oncology Group, a coalition of 70 or so university centers and 200 affiliated institutions conducting coordinated clinical trials nationwide.

"We're working hard to make sure that as many people as possible end up on the right side of the statistics," Dr. Di Saia says. "And we're making advances every year." It's frustrating for oncowarriors, he acknowledges, because the elusive cancer "cure" likely won't come in a single jump, like with the Salk vaccine or the Sabin vaccine. "It's more a constant improvement in outcomes in small steps," he says. "But when you accumulate those steps over 30 or 40 years, you see that we've actually come a long way." For example, when he was working on his clinical studies in the late 1960s and early 1970s, most ovarian cancer patients died in the first year after diagnosis, he points out. Now he has patients with that condition who he's treated for 10 or 15 years.

"We'll continue to see slow and constant improvement in outcomes and patient quality of life," he says, "until we reach a point where we'll have most of the diseases under control." Cancer, he stresses, isn't a single entity. "It's more like 100 entities, and they're all different," he says. "We've made great strides with some, and we've made very little progress with others. But in most we've done significant work in improving outcomes."

Some 40 years into his career, Dr. Di Saia has won what appears to be every award and accolade there is for cancer research and treatment excellence. But what motivates him is keeping patients as healthy as possible, one woman at a time. "This morning has been a good example of what motivates me," he commented. "I spent the morning seeing patients, some of whom I've followed for many years. The success that we've had, especially my patients who have advanced disease, is what motivates me."

He also values his role as a mentor, which is one of the nicer aspects of his academic work. "There are always young people around to stimulate your thinking--and young people who you can influence, who are eager to learn," he says.

That phrase--"eager to learn"--has characterized Dr. Di Saia since he was a kid. Like many doctors, his career path started in a very different place than medicine. Originally an engineering student at the liberal arts-oriented Brown University, he found himself required to take a biology course. "I became fascinated with biology and unfascinated with calculus," he says now. "So I switched to pre-med." After completing his medical school studies at Tufts University, he started the general surgery program at Yale University but became disenchanted with that specialty's sporadic patient interaction. "You have a gallbladder problem, you go to a general surgeon. You may see him once or twice. That's it," he says. He noticed that obstetric-gynecologic surgery, on the other hand, offered surgical opportunities and more continuity of care.

He also decided around that time to pursue a teaching path as well. "The question was in what subspecialty," he says. "I decided to pursue cancer." He trained for that at Houston's MD Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute.

A call from the former chief of ob-gyn from his Yale days brought Dr. Di Saia to the University of Southern California in 1970. In 1977, as UCI was being developed, "a crazy dean" called and offered him a job as chair of the brand-new ob-gyn department there. "I said, 'Sure'," he says with a chuckle. "I was 39. I didn't know any better!" Moving forward, he adds, he'd especially like to continue his research and professional education activities, with a special focus on improving specialty training programs to ensure that board-certified doctors are the best of the best.

Making that happen, of course, will require Dr. Di Saia to continue to keep his engine charged. And he does in a couple of ways, one that's familiar to many doctors--and one that should be. He and his wife collect wine, he reports, and can boast of a few notable collector's items in their 800-or-so-bottle wine cellar. He's not much of a drinker, though, so, while he loves the grape, he admits that most of that bounty will likely never be fully savored. His second path to relaxation? Needlepoint. "Few people know this, but I love needlepoint," he says. "I've been doing it for 25 years or so. I've made Christmas stockings for my wife and kids, and I just completed stockings for my year-old twin grandchildren." He emphasizes that he "needs to be inspired" to create something with his hobby. Sounds like a wife, children and grandkids have done the trick nicely.