As a six year old confined to his hospital bed because of cancer, KYLE HAYDOCK’s favorite writer was Tom Clancy. Kyle’s grandfather wrote a fan letter on Kyle’s behalf to Mr. Clancy, and Mr. Clancy wrote back. The two visited, went to Disney World together (the photograph shows them at Disney World), and became close friends before Kyle’s untimely death two years later of sarcoma. “Kyle,” wrote Mr. Clancy in an essay included in the book Fighting Chance, “was my little buddy–not a distant abstraction at all, a real kid my son’s age, bright and funny and perceptive.” Mr. Clancy calls cancer a war: “The children fight back as victims who want to live normal lives in the face of this most sinister and cruelest of maladies…Meanwhile, all around them the best minds and tools the medical profession has evolved are marshaled like an army to fight the war.” This professorship will support the important cancer research of a leader in the field of pediatric oncology.
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Kyle Haydock Professorship in Oncology
School of Medicine
Established in 2000 by Tom Clancy in memory of Kyle Haydock
Held by Don Small
DON SMALL, A&S 1979, Med 1985 (MD/PhD), the inaugural Kyle Haydock Professor, has spent his entire academic and professional career at Johns Hopkins. He pursued his PhD in the laboratory of Dr. Bert Vogelstein, and did clinical training in pediatrics and pediatric hematology/oncology, and postdoctoral research in DNA replication with Dr. Tom Kelly. Now a professor of oncology with clinical responsibilities in the Division of Pediatric Oncology, Dr. Small’s research interests include the molecular biology of and development of molecularly targeted therapy for leukemia.