Name: Profile: Tyler Curiel
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<div class="rich-text">(This video is no longer available for streaming.) Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on scientific and medical research in the New Orleans region. In the midst of the disaster, Dr. Tyler Curiel, the Chief of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Tulane University, did all that he could to salvage precious samples of cancer cells. The cells could shed light on a deadly disease called Sino Nasal Undifferentiated Carcinoma, and they carried special meaning for Curiel because they came from his beloved student Andy Martin, who died of the disease a year before the hurricane struck.
</div>

In the midst of Hurricane Katrina, a cancer researcher risks everything to save a medical treasure.

<div class="rich-text">In the midst of Hurricane Katrina, a cancer researcher risks everything to save a medical treasure.</div>

Amid Hurricane Katrina a cancer researcher risks everything to save a medical treasure.

Profile:  Tyler Curiel

Profile: Tyler Curiel

Body & Brain

<div class="rich-text"><h3>
 PROFILE: TYLER CURIEL
</h3>

 PBS Airdate: January 10, 2006



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 For a whole lot of
reasons—meteorological, political, engineering reasons—Hurricane
Katrina was a major, major science story last year.


 But now, we're going to add one more reason. We're going to tell you a
Katrina story about a young man who got very sick, but he had one bit of luck.
He had a very unusual friend, Dr. Tyler Curiel. Hold on a second, he's a hard
man to keep up with. He runs 100 mile marathons. This is a man who's on his
very own path; he goes where he wants to go.


 Now he's the Chief of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Tulane University
where he runs a lab that specializes in immune cells.



 TYLER CURIEL
 
 (Tulane University School of Medicine)
 
 :
 
 We look at
the human immune response to cancers and to infections.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 But Tyler had never seen anything or anyone
like Andy Martin. In 2000, Andy Martin, from California, was just about to
start medical school at Tulane.



 ANDY MARTIN :
 
 A week before I started my first year, it showed up. I was
on a vacation, like a last hurrah vacation, and I started getting
nosebleeds.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Andy was diagnosed with a very rare and very
deadly cancer, called S.N.U.C.



 TYLER CURIEL:
 
 S.N.U.C. is Sino Nasal Undifferentiated Carcinoma. Andy
decided that he wanted to do research on his own cancer. He persuaded me to
allow us to biopsy his tumor.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Andy said...



 AVRIL JENSEN
 
 (Andy Martin's sister)
 
 :
 
 "If this cancer's going to
get me, damn it, I'm going to go down fighting, you know, and make a
difference, so that future people who are diagnosed with this don't have the
same outcome that I had."



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 The student and his mentor worked side by
side to try to find a treatment, even though both of them knew that Andy didn't
have much time.



 AVRIL JENSEN:
 
 Tyler and him had a really good friendship, as well as,
you know, this amazing medical experience together.



 RUTH BERGGREN
 
 (Tyler Curiel's wife)
 
 :
 
 Andy came over to our house
for dinner many times. He enjoyed wine-tasting; particularly he was fond of
ports.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 When Andy was about to undergo chemotherapy
and lose his taste, Tyler, a bit of a connoisseur, threw a wine-tasting party.
And Andy's classmates shaved their heads in solidarity. Andy is the bald guy in
the middle.


 And the doctor raised money for his student's research by breaking a
world's record: he dribbled a basketball for 24 hours, while running a total of
108 miles.



 AVRIL JENSEN:
 
 He's crazy.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 They generated a living cell line from Andy's
tumor, the only known cell line of S.N.U.C. in the world. And those cells
outlived Andy. Already very sick, Andy Martin left home to visit friends at
Tulane when he was overcome by cancer, in November, 2004.



 AVRIL JENSEN:
 
 When it came to that week, Tyler kind of took over as his
personal physician. And he was there every day at least one time, sometimes
more. He, he passed away on a Friday night in New Orleans.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 And when Hurricane Katrina struck at the
heart of New Orleans, Tulane University was right in its path. People, homes
and property were in serious danger and so was a lot of science. Tyler decided
to stay in his lab through the storm.


 He was joined by his colleague and his neighbor at the lab,
Mike Brumlik. Together, they were determined to protect the millions of dollars
of equipment there, and the research and Andy Martin's cells.



 MIKE BRUMLIK
 
 (Tulane University School of Medicine)
 
 :
 
 These cells
were very important. There was...this was personal.



 TYLER CURIEL:
 
 ...number one thing I knew we had to save was we had to
get the Andy Martin S.N.U.C. cells out.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Their plan was simple. Keep all of the
samples dry and cold enough to survive just a brief loss of power. They spent
the whole weekend hard at work.



 TYLER CURIEL:
 
 We had consolidated all of our things into three or four
freezers.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Monday morning, the storm brought winds
stronger than 150 miles an hour.



 TYLER CURIEL:
 
 It was like
 <cite>
 The Wizard of Oz
 </cite>
 . We'd look out the
window and gigantic pieces of buildings would just go blowing by.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 By the time the storm ended, their building
was running on an emergency generator, but the samples were fine. Tyler went to
the phone to tell friends everything was okay.



 TYLER CURIEL:
 
 Mike Brumlik walked into my office—we're in Tulane
Medical School, in my office—and he said, "You might want to look out the
window."



 MIKE BRUMLIK:
 
 And he does this. And, uh, of course, his jaw drops,
because he realizes what...more or less what I realized, which is that we're in
very deep trouble.



 TYLER CURIEL:
 
 I looked out the window and saw that we were flooded. I
had no idea. As far as our research goes, this is the worst-case scenario. It
doesn't get any worse.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Suddenly, it's a race against time. The men
try to move a 400-pound freezer down six stories, and across this pedway, to
the building next door which has better emergency power.


 It takes them all day to move the samples. And when they finally make it to
the other building, the generator there is almost under water.



 MIKE BRUMLIK:
 
 The generator is not in a safe place. Six more inches of
water rising and the generator is toast, so we are effectively doomed at this
point.



 TYLER CURIEL:
 
 You don't want to be melodramatic, but I was thinking,
this is my whole life's work, and it's melting.



 MIKE BRUMLIK:
 
 And the power fails at about 5 p.m. on Tuesday. And that's
it. The only place to save anything cold is the liquid nitrogen tanks.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 The problem is liquid nitrogen will
evaporate, which means the samples have maybe 10 days, and then they'll
melt.



 TYLER CURIEL:
 
 And you're looking around, the city's flooded, you're
thinking, it's going to be months before we can come back in. We had no idea.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 The next morning, after Tyler and Mike had
packed everything they could into the liquid nitrogen, they get another
surprise; this one comes in uniform.



 TYLER CURIEL:
 
 You've got two minutes to get out and evacuate or you're
going in handcuffs. It was...bang...and then, they've got big rifles on their
back. And you don't argue with people like this. I couldn't find my shoes. And
I kept telling them, I'm just looking for my shoes. And they said, "Buddy,
you're going in the cuffs." We left our food behind, we left our water behind,
and we were off.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Tyler was headed to Charity Hospital, where
there were still hundreds of patients.



 TYLER CURIEL:
 
 I had been there a few times and saw how desperate
conditions were. Mike said, "If you're going to Charity, I'm going to
Charity."



 MIKE BRUMLIK:
 
 I had done everything I could do to protect the science.
And now it was time to help people.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Tyler and Mike hopped into a canoe they had
been keeping handy.



 TYLER CURIEL:
 
 ...shove off and we'd paddle right out through that exit
right there.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 And then they paddled a couple of blocks down
to Charity, where Tyler's wife, Ruth Berggren, was one of the doctors in
charge.



 RUTH BERGGREN:
 
 He said, "What can I do for you?" And I thought about it,
and I said, "Honestly, I need you to go fetch water." So here's my brilliant
husband, the scientist, the immunologist. He actually said to me, he said, "I'm
a perfect person for this job."



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 By now, these guys had seen just about
everything.



 TYLER CURIEL:
 
 We had already been flooded in for four or five days. Food
was low, water was low; we had been without electricity for a number of days.
It was very hot. Conditions were terrible.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 They had successfully evacuated the patients
at Charity Hospital.



 TYLER CURIEL:
 
 So I realized, you know, time's up. You have to go.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 But remember, the clock was ticking. It had
been three days since Tyler put his lab samples into the liquid nitrogen. He
had a week, maybe less, to keep them from melting, including the cells of Andy
Martin.



 AVRIL JENSEN:
 
 It was scary. It was a very scary time. And my mom even
said it's like Andy dying all over again.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 From Dallas, Tyler worked the phones for
almost a week. He got a jet, coolers. And now he and Mike raced back to New
Orleans.



 MIKE BRUMLIK:
 
 Now the lab smells bad because we have freezer stuff and
fridge stuff that's perished, so it doesn't smell pretty. But preying on our
mind is, "Did the nitrogen make it?"



 TYLER CURIEL:
 
 And we had the three liquid nitrogen containers lined up,
one, two, three. I turned to Mike. I said, "Mike, I'm going to lift the lid,
and if it's warm in there and the samples are thawed, game's over." And he
said, "Do it."



 MIKE BRUMLIK:
 
 Together we lift the lid and this plume of, of, of vapor
hits us in the face.



 TYLER CURIEL:
 
 It was really cold. It was really white. That's what it's
supposed to look like.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 By chance, out of all the samples inside all
three freezers, the first box that Tyler pulled out contained Andy Martin's
cells, frozen, safe and sound.



 AVRIL JENSEN:
 
 I was calling everybody. Oh, they made it out!



 TYLER CURIEL:
 
 So we were high-fiving and just going, "Yeah!"



 AVRIL JENSEN:
 
 One of the port wines that Andy liked, he actually had a
bottle, and it's still at my parents' house. And Tyler had made some crack
about celebrating, and I said, "Well, I have one of Andy's bottles of Fonseco,
you know? I can ship it to you, wherever you want." He said, "No, I'd like if
you would save that, and we can all celebrate together when we see each other
again."



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Andy's cells were saved, but Tyler lost a lot
of research. And he's not alone.



 TYLER CURIEL:
 
 My sense is that we've lost millions of dollars worth of
research, thousands of man-hours of research. And then you multiply that times
hundreds of investigators. And it's staggering.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 But Tyler knows how to stay on his feet.



 TYLER CURIEL
 
 (Turning car ignition on)
 
 :
 
 How about that?



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 His home wasn't too damaged. And he had to
shift his lab work to different cities for a while. But New Orleans is calling,
and it won't be long before Tyler's whole operation is back up and
running.
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