the many lives of carl morrison
Some lives follow a straight path, a single track, one experience leading neatly and logically to the next. Others are marked by divergence, railroad switches pulled by circumstance or by choice.
Dr. Carl Morrison’s life is of the latter sort: “I think a lot of people, they don’t think five or ten years ahead. They envision it, but they don’t really stop to think ‘what’s my ten-year plan?’ But I’ve had this kind of patter n that, every ten years, I stop and I do something different. I reinvent my life, right?”
Today, Morrison is Professor of Oncology, Senior Vice President of Scientific Development and Integrative Medicine, and Chief of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Buffalo, New York’s Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center.
At Roswell Park, Morrison’s impact is broad. His forward-thinking approach to leadership at the Center has been critical in keeping Roswell at the forefront of cancer research and treatment. He’s developing advanced technologies and working to link Roswell’s research and clinical arms so that its patients receive the highest quality and most up-to-date cancer treatments possible.
The sheer volume of his accomplishments in oncology is such that you might assume he set out to do this work from the start–but that’s not the case. Today’s Dr. Carl Morrison has in fact been at various points in his time on earth a farmer’s son, a college football player, a cattle rancher, a large animal veterinarian, and a businessman.
He’s lived many lives, each compelling on its own but all together telling a singular, extraordinary story.
I visited Dr . Morrison’s office on a Wednesday morning, early–his typical work day starts at four or five in the morning–to talk about his vision for Roswell Park, what drives him, where he’s been, and where he’s going. On the wall opposite his desk, there’s a framed photograph of a horse. Otherwise, the walls are bare but for a fe w diplomas. He’s a big man with a salt-and-pepper mustache and a Kentucky accent.
“You have to ask yourself, are you truly destined to be who you are or does your environment shape you? I think it’ s a combination of both, right? Definitely, right?” he beg ins when I ask him the impossibly broad question: How’d you get here? “But if I had to go back and say, you know, what’s the one thing that shaped my life, it’s the way the first, probably, ten to twenty years of my life were.”
Morrison was born and raised in rural Kentucky, one of three children. His father was a child of the Great Depression who had watched his family lose their farm, stopped attending school after second grade to work, and served in the military. He had done all of it without complaint.
“So I grew up with this concept that you worked,” he says. “If you wanted something, you had to work for it. And if you wanted something done, you did it yourself.”
This is the most valuable wisdom Morrison received from his father: that hard work without resentment is the foundation for success. It would propel him forward and make it possible for him to successfully change course time and time again–often to the surprise of his steadily consistent father.
The first time Morrison’s inherited work ethic took him down an unexpected path was when he applied it to football.“By the end of my senior year [of high school], I was a very good football player and I decided I wanted to play in college. I would never have gone to college otherwise.”
Morrison attended Center College on a full scholar ship. He spent four years playing football, working in the cafeteria and then the library, studying hard, and against the odds graduating top of his class. After graduation, surprising his father yet again, he looked at his options–go back home with his degree and start a career or go on to graduate school. He chose the unexpected and left central Kentucky for veterinary school in central Ohio.
In 1982, with his advanced degree, Morrison returned to Kentucky. He worked as veterinarian to some of the most elite horses in the country, standing alongside them in the Kentucky Derby winners’ circle more than once. Eventually, he opened his own veterinary clinic.
And then, 12 years later, Morrison’s sister, born just shy of a year after him, died of melanoma.
“I was devastated by it,” he says. Stage IV metastatic melanoma is just that–devastating. Ten years prior, she had had a melanoma removed from her back. Now the disease was back and it was far more deadly. Just six months after the diagnosis she was gone. “And I just got up one day and said ‘I’m gonna do something different.’ Like my ten-year plan. I thought about two choices. I thought about being a carpenter–my grandfather was a carpenter and I always liked building–and I started to do that. But then I thought, ‘well maybe I should do something a little more meaningful.’ So I applied to medical school and got in. I was 36.”
Morrison considers himself lucky that as he was finishing up medical school and starting his residency, “innovation” dominated the field. After four and a half decades of reinventing himself, an attraction to forward-looking, even world-changing, medicine was natural. He took an interest in molecular pathology at a time when gene sequencing was exploding into the mainstream and the world was beginning to really understand cancer.
Knowing that Morrison was already “fiddling around”–his words–in melanoma research, the head of pathology at his university invited him to lead a lab exploring the connections between disease and genetics.
With his 12 years of experience running a business to guide him, Morrison secured the funding to grow his laboratory from one researcher to 20 in just three years. It was during these three years that Morrison made contact with Roswell Park.
“This was when people started to sequence the human genome in the late 1990s and early 2000s,” he says. “I was doing research with the cutting-edge tech that Roswell Park was famous for–they created what was called the ‘backbone of the human genome’ through these things called RP-11 clones: Roswell Park-11 clones.”
Roswell Park invited Dr. Morrison to give a talk about the importance of preparing today’s technologies in pathology for tomorrow. In 2007, Morrison moved to Buffalo to join the faculty at Roswell.
Since joining Roswell Park, Morrison has led significant advancement in the Center’s treatment methods and technologies, including heading up the effort a decade ago to shift Roswell to a personalized approach to cancer treatment, where targeted therapies are used to minimize the infamously painful side effects of therapies like chemo and radiation while maximizing the effectiveness of the treatment. He led the establishment of Roswell’s Center for Personalized Medicine and founded OmniSeq, a biotechnology company that emerged from the Center’s research and Morrison’s vision for more effective personalized treatment plans through advanced genetic diagnostics.
In addition to his clinical work, he’s propelling the Center forward by developing innovative technologies that strengthen ties between cancer research and clinical practice . Bridging the two areas of focus sets Roswell on track to continue offering the most effective modern treatments for their patients.
“Basically,” he says,“my focus here is on planning for five years from today or ten years from today.Ten years ago we looked at something as a miracle that today we think of as normal.That’s the way it should be–what we once thought of as the future becoming the norm.”
Indeed, Morrison’s “ten-year plan” philosophy and his firm belief in hard work continue to shape his approach to his work and his approach to life itself. “I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve been one of those people–my life could have gone any one of maybe four ways,” he says. Then he adds, “And it seems like it’s turned out good.”
It has. Morrison lives in a house he built himself, on 150 acres of farmland, with his wife, daughter, and son and dozens of chickens, goats, pigs, cows, and–of course–horses. It’s clear that as he’s reinvented himself over the years, he’s never left his past selves behind.