Drs. Eddie Méndez and Ahmed Diab had been wrestling with words and data for weeks, trying to prepare a new manuscript for publication. But now they were running out of time.
They were proud of the paper. It reported on an early-phase trial of a potential new drug to treat certain head and neck cancers, Méndez’s area of expertise as a surgeon and a scientist.
Diab wasn’t a physician. And he wasn’t an expert in these hard-to-treat cancers. He was a postdoctoral research fellow in Méndez’s lab, studying how cells grow, divide and multiply. Diab had initially doubted his place in his mentor’s lab — he felt like an “imposter” when he arrived at Fred Hutch in 2016, he said — but Méndez had encouraged him to believe in himself, to believe that basic science could make a difference in patients’ lives.
