Paul Marks, the former president and chief executive of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, has died, the New York Times reports. He was 93.
According to the Times, Marks joined Memorial Sloan Kettering at a key juncture in its evolution. In 1980 when he took the post, the paper notes that the cancer center was still grappling with fallout from a data falsification scandal from the 1970s and hadn't yet embraced new biological research in the field. But it adds that Marks transformed the institution, a shift that the Times notes wasn't without troubles. For instance, it notes he put a strict tenure review process in place and was sometimes known as "'Caligula,' 'Attila the Hun,' or simply 'the monster.'"
"Paul looked at what was at the time a stodgy Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and envisioned the great clinical and research enterprise that it could become — and indeed did become," Joseph Goldstein from UT Southwestern Medical Center tells the Times.
While running Memorial Sloan Kettering, Marks also continued his own research into the genetics of thalassemias and targeted cancer therapies, it adds, noting that he retired in 1999.