By Damaris Christensen

Charting Her Course

With exacting precision, Heidi Nelson strives to make the world better

By Damaris Christensen

Because of those concerns, the clinical trial Nelson spearheaded to examine laparoscopy for colon cancer was controversial from the start. Eventually, 872 patients at 48 institutions joined the Clinical Outcomes of Surgical Therapy (COST) study, which was funded by the National Cancer Institute. Each surgeon who participated followed a defined protocol and had to submit videos of their operations to Nelson’s team so they could ensure that the procedures met specified standards. On top of her surgical schedule, which often kept her in the hospital from 7 in the morning until 9 at night, Nelson found herself reviewing these surgical videos at night and traveling frequently to talk about the study and recruit institutions to participate.

The COST study became “a day and night job,” Nelson says. “I loved the work I did … [but] when you are wrapped up in surgery, it can take over your life. I don’t feel that is necessarily wrong, but it was maybe a little more consuming than it should have been.” In the spare time she did have, she drew up plans to renovate her home in the countryside outside Rochester and slowly planted more than 600 evergreen trees on her 21-acre property.

In 2000, Nelson looked at her life with typical hard-edged clarity and, with some regrets, closed her immunology lab. After she became a mother in 2002, she cut back her evening surgical schedule so she could be home with her daughter, Sarah. The COST study had concluded the previous year; in 2004, Nelson’s team reported that laparoscopic surgery fared as well as traditional surgery for most people with colon cancer. In addition, patients responded well to what they saw as improvements in their quality of life with the less invasive surgery, Nelson says.

Today Nelson continues to see patients, but also spends about half of her week as a co-chair of the American College of Surgeons Oncology Group (ACOSOG), working to improve collaboration between cancer clinical trials and basic science research. “Clinical research without some integration of basic science is not going to be enough,” she says.

Nelson has “her heart and soul” in her work with the oncology group, says Beth Martinez, the group administrator for ACOSOG, who is based in Durham, N.C. “And she’s a wonderful mother,” she adds.

“Somehow she manages to juggle everything. Everything she does is 100 percent,” says Martinez. “She has succeeded [at] being a female surgeon in a male-dominated field, and held strong to her goals and thoughts and ideals in an arena where women are still not the norm.”