IT Blog

From his home in Portola Valley, California, Sanjiv Gambhir logged on to an important meeting for his startup one afternoon in April 2020. He kept the video camera off.

This was unusual, not least because he cherished face-to-face connections and was obsessed with visibility. A pioneer of molecular imaging and the director of Stanford’s Canary Center for Early Cancer Detection, Gambhir, known as Sam, had spent decades trying to make small, hidden tumors inside the body easier to see. Nearly 600,000 people in the U.S. die from cancer every year, mostly because we tend to catch tumors when they’re too late to effectively treat.

“Cancer doesn’t need to be a death sentence,” Gambhir would tell the researchers in his lab, as he reminded them of the actual patients they were trying to save. By the time he was 50, his breakthroughs in early detection—including developing the reporter genes used in positron emission tomography, or PET scans—had led to three startups, millions…