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I wrote last week that I'm not posting the most viewed stories of the year on NewsCut this year, but I will post 

 story of the year -- the one I wrote about on this date in 2015.  Nothing much has changed. My story of the year in 2018, is the same one it was in 2015.

I was thinking about this Friday night while giving a Lyft ride to a young man who moved to Minnesota from Chicago when he was 24. "It's a bad place for people my age," he said.

https://twitter.com/MyLittleBloggie/status/1076489033646260224

A year ago he got a job in a warehouse in Brooklyn Center and commuted from the East Side while we talked about his appreciation for what Minnesota has given him that Chicago couldn't.

We don't think about a lot of things near often enough. That's one of them.  People putting one foot in front of another, to get to where they're going.

Is it a cure? Who knows? It's early, though it seems like we've been trying to cure cancer forever.

Here's the thing: My guests were cancer researchers Dr. Roxana Dronca of Mayo Clinic and Dr. Christopher Pennell of the University of Minnesota, who, like all cancer researchers, get up every day and go to work, hoping for success, but more often find failure. That's the nature of success.

"I'm not the most patient person in the real life, but I learned that I can be patient in research and in the clinic," Dr. Dronca said.

"My father was amazed I went into the field because I was not a patient child," Dr. Pennell told me. "But the payoff is worth it. Ninety-five percent of the time it doesn't work, but that 5 percent when it does is just phenomenally exciting. It's worth it."

If you merely look at today, you're not going to see much coming out of the research lab. But if you look over time, you'll see people who are alive today because of the failures leading to the successes of yesterday.

This is the image I got when I thought about my guests' comments.

This is the moment, somewhere near Sleepy Eye, Minn., when I said to my then-86-year-old mother that she needed to fly the airplane. I said it right after 

she told me she always wanted to be like Amelia Earhart

She didn't become Amelia Earhart. She was a Depression kid and they didn't make many Amelia Earharts back then. She married my father at the beginning of the war, became a hairdresser, then raised a family when he returned. I don't know whether she wishes she'd been born at a different time for women; I never asked, though she scolded me once when I mentioned 

Long before I was old and stupid, I was young and stupid.

We landed in Fairmont, Minn., and sat on a bench by the runway, listening to the quiet by the cornfields, and talking about her life growing up on the Plains.

Fast forward to May, when I was "home" (the Berkshires of Massachusetts) for a wedding and had a chance to give a ride to friends and relatives.

This is my niece, Julie Thurston, and she is the woman raising the children (along with my nephew, Tom, I must point out) 

, the one who let her daughters go fly in a plane built by a guy who 

"I want them to experience all that they want to experience. I don’t want them to ever be afraid to try new things,” she said.

Her daughters have more opportunities for those experiences now thanks to parents who allow them, and old-timers who always wanted to be Amelia Earhart, who took baby steps while pulling a society where it didn't want to go. Forward.

That's one of the reasons Captain Chipo M. Matimba and Captain Elizabeth Simbi Petro became one of the big stories in 2015 -- 

Women don't get the same respect, opportunities, or value they deserve. Not yet, anyway.

But those flights in May with two little girls reinforced my desire to honor those who pull us forward, which I've done to the consternation of people who think women cannot get opportunities unless they're taken from men.

, just as it appears we're getting nowhere in finding a cure for cancer when the obituary pages are full of people who've just lost a "

But the world is full of impatient people patiently willing to fail for the payoff of one day's victory, even if it comes in someone else's time.

They're the people who take one step. Then another. And they're 

NewsCut

Bob Collins

Author

 story of the year -- the one I wrote about on this date in 2015.  Nothing much has changed. My story of the year in 2018, is the same one it was in 2015

I wrote last week that I'm not posting the most viewed stories of the year on NewsCut this year, but I will post the story of the year -- the one I wrote about on this date in 2015.  Nothing much has changed. My story of the year in 2018, is the same one it was in 2015


President Jimmy Carter said he is cancer free after treatment for melanoma earlier this year. Carter received a kind of immunotherapy treatment that has proven especially successful with melanoma. Researchers are clamoring to apply the therapy, which gives a boost to the body's natural immune response, to other types of cancers. Bob Collins spoke with two experts about this approach to fighting cancer Dr. Roxana Dronca and Dr. Christopher Pennell.

Immunotherapy; An exciting front in the fight against cancer

Collins, Bob

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The story of the year: Same old same old

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