Anson’s culture is one that puts high value and importance on giving back to the community and society as part of measuring its value return on business.   Anson employees are encouraged to give back to the community, and even have an allocation of work time available to serve in this capacity.

On Saturday a number of Anson employees participated in an event sponsored by the Komen Tissue Bank affiliated with the Simon Cancer Center at the Indiana University Medical School.   Not only did they donate of their time, but literally of themselves; the Komen Tissue Bank is the only known tissue bank focused exclusively on the collection of healthy breast tissue samples to share with research scientists around the world as they conduct meta-analysis research on the complex triggers of the varied forms of breast cancer.    Healthy donor tissue samples are of vital importance to this research, and yet one might think it’s difficult to find healthy people in today’s hectic society who are willing to take the time and suffer some discomfort related to tissue sample collection procedures.   One would be wrong. 

For these Anson employees, and indeed, for thousands of others like them, this is a expression of caring about the community and the cause.  For example, The Army of Women is a program launched by the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, with the explicit goal of recruiting one million women to participate in breast cancer research.  According to the web site, the Army of Women has two primary goals:

• To recruit one million healthy women of every age and ethnicity, including breast cancer survivors and women at high-risk for the disease, to partner with breast cancer researchers and directly participate in the research that will eradicate breast cancer once and for all.
• To challenge the scientific community to expand its current focus to include breast cancer prevention research conducted on healthy women.

Bioinformatics research is a complex process and requires access to enormous amounts of data, computing power, and biological samples in order to provide statistically relevant insights into the study of disease and the genomic clues to its mechanisms.   The overall enormous and complex, but the sources of samples aren’t; its simply individual people that have a passion and care about others. 

This reminds me of the classic story about a vistor to a city where many stone cutters were working. Approaching several of the cutters, he asked them the same question: “What are you doing?” The first stonecutter he met replied, “I’m cutting stone. It’s dull work, but it pays the bills.”  A second stonecutter responded, “I’m the best stone cutter in the land. Look at the smoothness of this stone, how perfect the edges are.”  A third pointed to a foundation several yards away, and said, “I’m building a cathedral.”

Hat’s off to my colleagues and friends here at Anson who on Saturday made their own contributions to the Personalized Medicine Cathedral.   Great job.