Designing radiopharmaceuticals involves combining the right radioisotope with a targeting molecule, in order to take it to the tumor. The selection of the targeting molecule depends upon the type of cancer. In the case of breast cancer, for example, a hormone molecule might be used.

With her background interest in women’s health, it was no surprise to find Carver collaborating with Elaine Lawless, MU Professor of English. After adapting some of the survivor stories for performance, in 2003 they formed the Troubling Violence Performance Project “to create a venue for people to communicate about intimate partner violence.” While they began performing stories from Lawless’ book, the stories soon emerged from elsewhere: “People starting coming up to us after the performances and asking if they could give us their stories,” many of which were then incorporated into subsequent performances. “If one out of every four women likely to suffer some kind of intimate partner abuse, then we need to really speak out. We don’t think we’re going to come in and perform and all violence is going to end. We just know that if people don’t talk about it…it’s going to be swept under the carpet.”

Since October of 2006, Carver has been developing Booby Prize, a comedy about the unfunny subject of breast cancer. “It’s a one-woman show featuring me [laughs],” and how she was “lucky” to be the one of every seven women to get the disease. Through Booby Prize, which is ever evolving, Carver is able to combine her interest in social activism, women’s health, and autobiography: “I decided that I could have breast cancer and still have a sense of humor, and still do my work. And so that’s when Booby Prize, you know, became born, the idea that—unfortunately—I won the prize. I won the Booby Prize, which you don’t want to win, you don’t want to be the 1 out of 7 who wins, but I won, and so that’s how I start off the performance.” Much of the performance features Carver performing actual stories that happened to her, infusing humor into the reality of her situation. At the conclusion of Booby Prize, Carver warns the audience against expecting closure and a happy ending. Despite the clean bill of health at her last medical checkup, the possibility of cancer returning lingers on, and so Carver reminds the audience, “I don’t have a pretty ending; my ending is still up in the air.” Among audience members, Carver has observed not only laughter and tears, as might be expected, but “people doing both at the same time, and not quite knowing what to do about it.” The thread that runs through Booby Prize—like Carver’s other scholarly and creative projects—is storytelling. Some of the stories are painful, and some are funny. Either way, Carver always tries “to keep it raw.”

Henry is also involved in a number of research projects outside of the COTC, focusing on spontaneously occurring cancer in animals, more specifically breast cancer, bone cancer, and bladder cancer. Chuckling, she remarks, “so I guess any tumor that starts with a ‘b’ is what I’m focused on right now.”

As a graduate student in the Division of Biological Sciences, William Donald Thomas works in the area of molecular and protein biology. Specifically, his research--with mentor George P. Smith in the Phage Display Lab seeks to find peptides that bind to breast cancer cells in hopes of developing better diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer.

Thomas explains: “Right now, the imaging and treatment of cancer is pretty nonspecific. The hope is that we can make or discover molecules that are specific to cancer, because the current treatment for cancer basically just targets cells that grow fast and, in doing so, they make people sick. The whole motivation is to find something that can specifically target cancer cells, in this case, breast cancer cells.” As such, Thomas’ research involves cloning different proteins and selecting a protein that is over-expressed in breast cancer cells called ErbB2.

A typical week for Thomas actually begins the previous week, meeting with his adviser, planning experiments, and discussing problems encountered. “Right now my goal is to find peptides that bind to cancer cells, but that is going to take a lot of little steps. A lot of proteins are going to have to be made and designed. I spend a fair amount of time designing the experiments and then doing them.” When the experiments don’t work, Thomas must re-design them. “In a nutshell, I play with proteins all day,” he jokes. “Fundamentally, I’m studying protein to protein interactions, so that I can find things that could be used to bind breast cancer cells.”

“Cancer treatment, as it stands now, is like going at a very particular problem with a sledge hammer, when we need something more fine-tuned like a scalpel. Otherwise, we are making the patient sick by indiscriminately killing cells; the pain endured from cancer treatments can take its toll. We want to be able to increase the patient’s health and not decrease the quality of life.”