Dr. Gottlieb, a cancer patient himself, was attended by Dr. Robert Livingston and Dr. Emil Freireich. He was admitted to the hospital as a patient on June 28, 1975 and succumbed to the disease he had worked so hard to conquer on July 1, 1975 at 7:52 AM. Ultimately, bronchopneumonia, caused by a Flavobacterium, would claim his life, though clearly the metastatic cancer was the culprit.
A note from myself, I decided not to follow my father into the cancer field, although I did my earliest research at M.D. Anderson working in the field of leukemia. After my Ph.D. in biological sciences, I briefly worked in the area of cancer therapeutics, including working on new diagnostics and biomarkers for breast cancer, among others. My interests, though, lay in virology. I had studied polyomavirus in my Ph.D. and, interesting enough was on a Cancer Training Grant from NIH, for polyomavirus is considered one of the classic tumor viruses. Today, as many as 40% of cancers are considered to arise from viruses. I switched my focus to vaccines and have worked for the past 7 years to bring new vaccines through clinical trials, including smallpox, influenza, adenovirus, dengue virus, Japanese encephalitis virus, and many others. I find it fitting that today, my father's career and my career have converged with the rise of cancer vaccines.
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