Scott Bremner

We lost a pioneer today.

I know that’s an overused word, doled out freely to describe someone who has lived a long life or who did a particular thing a little sooner than others.

But when 64-year old John Kanzius lost his fight against leukemia and pneumonia, we lost a pioneer in the true sense of the word.

We lost someone who had done more than take the road less traveled; he took a road untraveled.

It’s not that radio waves hadn’t been used in medicine before.

That’s actually a common practice along with distant cousins like x-rays and microwaves.

It’s not that gold hadn’t been used in the human body before; gold has filled teeth and arthritic joints for years.

But when John used a hot dog and his wife’s pie pans to envision embedding microscopic bits of metal into cancer cells and then heating and killing those cells with directed radio waves, he went, with apologies to Star Trek, where no one had gone before.

And when researchers found proteins that would coat those metal molecules to target cancer cells through the blood stream, those researchers began envisioning what might one day become the Holy Grail of their work; a painless, non-surgical means of eradicating cancer from the human race.

Two teams are now testing up the food chain trying to win approval for human trials; one in Texas, the other in Pittsburgh; testimony to the power that can come from one moment of inspiration.

John Kanzius was a radio engineer in his soul.

As such, he probably preferred the inner workings of a machine to the interactions of large groups of people.

He accepted the spotlight as part of his mission; but I always suspected that the soft-spoken man seen on the Today show or 60 Minutes would rather be alone with a ham radio talking to someone in Guam.

John was my first boss, when he was the General Manager at WJET and I was a cub reporter fresh out of college.

I would see him only infrequently in those days; we’d pass in the hall and he’d say a brief “hello.”

Other staffers told me that if he had a criticism, I’d hear it.

If all I got was “Hello” they said, then I was probably doing all right.

The great irony of John’s life is that his therapy is on track to one day treat the very disease that killed him.

He stubbornly refused to sell the rights to his patents, working to make certain that any future jobs stayed in Erie.

You have to wonder if a faster track could have made a difference in John’s own fight, or if his loyalty to our town came at the risk of his own life.

John Kanzius was a pioneer, and sometime next week hundreds will make the trek to Erie to reflect on the lives that he touched.

History and the research of the next few years will decide, if his reach could one day touch millions.