The Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center stands proud on the corner of Pierce Street, its dark windows reflecting the late afternoon sun on an unseasonably warm spring day.
It is a Friday, just days before the center's director emeritus, Hal Moses, is to be honored with the T.J. Martell Foundation's Medical Lifetime Achievement Award, but right now all he can talk about is the weather.
He can't wait for the weekend, when he has plans to wander around the woods on his West Nashville property, picking up sticks and clearing out brush.
"To other people it might be hard work, but to us it's relaxing," his wife, Linda, later reflects. "He might have burned out a long time ago if he hadn't been able to come home and do those things."
Indeed, it's been more than 40 years since Dr. Moses graduated from Vanderbilt Medical College and began his illustrious career in cancer research. A renowned scientist, his laboratory discoveries have catapulted tumor research and set up his success as a mentor and administrator in the medical world.
It is those accomplishments for which he's being recognized, but his dedication has not been free of personal affliction. In July, his eldest daughter, Jeanne, 46, was diagnosed with the very disease he has spent four decades trying to decipher.
Suddenly the man who had never seen cancer as anything other than a scientific puzzle was forced to acknowledge it as something more.
"He's been doing cancer research for a long time," Linda Moses said. "But you just don't really understand it until you are living it."
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