Jim Olson, Author, Teacher, Gentle Man

Sam has a lot of great teachers but Jim Olson is perhaps it’s most celebrated.
He is the only Sam professor to have earned all three of the University’s most prestigious awards – for Teaching, in 1977; for Research in 1988; and for Service in 2005.
He’s the author of more than 40 books and a two-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize. The publisher of his latest book, the Johns Hopkins University Press, is one of the nation’s most respected publishers.
For all of that, Olson is humble, soft-spoken and unpretentious man, with a great gift of intellect and eloquence as a writer.
His latest book is about cancer and the search for cures, treatments and an understanding of how cancers, in their many forms, begin and spread. If you want to understand the arch of cancer treatment, read his book: “Making Cancer History: Disease and Discovery at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.”
He writes about the science, but also about the personalities, the egos, the politics, the rivalries and economics of cancer research and treatment.
Jim Olson knows a lot about cancer, and M.D. Anderson.
“I had cancer. I have cancer. I will always have cancer,” he writes.
Olson has been treated at M.D. Anderson off and on for the last 28 years. It was there that his left arm was amputated, just after Christmas in 1987, to rid him of an epithelioid sarcoma in his wrist that was about to kill him.
“Making Cancer History” is serious but compelling reading. Take this sentence: “For farmers and ranchers in Texas, decades of mending fences, plowing fields, and chasing cattle under cloudless skies and a blistering sun wrinkled their skin until it resembled the cracks and fissures in the parched earth,” as he goes on to make his point that such exposure to ultraviolet radiation elevates the risk of skin cancers – basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas and melanomas.
Olson’s latest feat is a pleasure to read; it will help lay readers better understand one of humankind’s more challenging problems, and may it well earn Jim Olson further awards and honors.
But he will still be on campus this fall, in the classroom, doing what he really loves to do most, teaching freshmen.