Page 21 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 1 Fall 2013

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Taylor Schreiber ’98 knew something was wrong. He had
run barely a third of a mile on the treadmill when he
found himself doubled over, gasping for breath, unable
to continue. Schreiber, then 31, had always been athletic,
and running several miles at the gym was a regular part
of his fitness routine.
Schreiber had just returned from a weeklong vacation
with his wife, Nicki, in Costa Rica. He had been feeling a
sense of sluggishness and had noticed a persistent dry
cough for a few weeks. On several nights, he had woken
up drenched in sweat. But when he could not run even
half a mile, he finally decided to get himself checked out.
Schreiber was a respected graduate student in cancer biol-
ogy and immunology research at the University of Miami
at the time. He had completed his Ph.D., was wrapping up
a year of post-graduate research, and preparing for his
first clinical year of medical school, on the way to his M.D.
Less than a week later, on April
Fool’s Day 2011, Schreiber received
a shocking diagnosis: He had stage
3B Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer
of the lymph nodes.
In an e-mail to family and friends
a few weeks later, Schrieber called
his diagnosis “the ultimate irony of
my life.” The focus of his research
was oncology hematology, studying
and treating leukemias and lymph-
omas, and he already had made sig-
nificant discoveries, distinguishing
himself as a rising star in the field.
Few SPS alumni achieve as much
as Schreiber had so soon after grad-
uation. Even fewer face the same
dire circumstances. “This was what
I wanted to focus my life’s work on,”
he says, “and all of a sudden it hap-
pened to me.”
Schreiber, who grew up in Am-
herst, N.H., had been interested in
science and medicine from an early
age. “I always had a natural curiosity to know what was
going on inside of things,” he recalls.
Schreiber lost his maternal grandfather to lung cancer
when he was 10. Rather than let Taylor and his brother
see their grandfather on his deathbed at Maine Medical
Center, his parents brought them to another wing of the
hospital. Schreiber’s uncle, a radiologist, let Taylor and
his brother hold a probe and other tools in his lab. This
was Schreiber’s first introduction to medicine, and he
was hooked.
The summer before entering St. Paul’s as a Third
Former in 1994, Schreiber worked in the cafeteria at
Catholic Medical Center in Manchester, N.H., serving
meals and washing dishes. “My parents told me I needed a
summer job, and I wanted to try to be as close to medicine
as possible,” he recalls.
During his Sixth Form year at SPS, Schreiber pursued
an Independent Study Project, working with a radiologist
at Concord Hospital. He went on to Bucknell University,
where he majored in biology and began preparing to apply
to medical school.
The summer between his freshman and sophomore
years at Bucknell, he interned in a kidney research lab at
the Harvard Institutes of Medicine. Schreiber was thrilled
and fascinated by his surroundings in the lab. “It was an
absolutely terrifying experience,” he recalls. ”You go in
there for the first time, and it’s like being in a foreign
landscape, with chemicals all over the place.”
Schreiber returned for the next two summers, gradually
developing expertise in scientific research. Following his
senior year at Bucknell, he decided to defer medical school
and return to Harvard, to a different lab, working with
Dr. Robert Sackstein in the department of dermatology.
Sackstein became one of Schrei-
ber’s most important mentors
and a close friend. “Taylor is phen-
omenally focused and incredibly
intelligent,” Sackstein says. “Put
those things together and you get
someone bound for greatness.
He’s just a remarkable person.”
During his two years in Sack-
stein’s lab, Schreiber’s interests
began to focus on cancer and
immunology. Sackstein’s derma-
tology lab was studying graft-
versus-host disease, a skin
condition associated with bone
marrow transplants in the treat-
ment of lymphoma. Around the
same time, Schreiber read several
newly published papers in promi-
nent medical journals discussing
the role of the immune system
in cancer.
“During those two years,”
Schreiber recalls, “I developed
a fascination with the immune system and how our
bodies defend us from disease.”
Under Sackstein’s tutelage, Schreiber eventually decided
that, as important as medicine was to him, pure scientific
research held equal importance. He began focusing on
applying to joint-degree M.D./Ph.D. programs. The M.D.
would allow him to work with patients, while the Ph.D.
program would provide a much more rigorous founda-
tion in scientific research.
With a glowing recommendation from Sackstein,
Schreiber was admitted with a full scholarship into the
M.D./Ph.D. program at the University of Miami’s Miller
School of Medicine.
Schreiber flourished in Miami. During the first few
years of medical school, he rotated through several labs
and continued to develop his interests in immunology
This was
what I wanted
to focus my
life’s work
on . . . and all
of a sudden
it happened
to me.
“
”