Close to Home: A young woman searches for answers about the disease that took her parents’ lives

By Pamela Ferdinand | Summer 2008 for CR Magazine

Stephanie Kinkel moved across the country last year from California to pursue biology research as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Peers and faculty members ask her, like other newcomers, the usual questions: Do her parents still live in San Diego? When are they going to visit? And will she spend the holidays with them?

Depending on the person, she either smiles and politely changes the subject or tells them the truth. The truth is that Kinkel, 27, is an orphan. But more than that, she is an aspiring cancer researcher orphaned by that very disease: Her father died in 1993 from liver cancer. Less than three years later, metastatic breast cancer took her mother’s life.

“There was nothing she could do about her parents, but there was something she could do about other peoples’ parents,” says Wahl, a past president of the AACR.
Thinking back to her childhood, Kinkel recalls an idyllic time: A nice home in a suburban community. A stay-at-home mom. A father who worked at home as a mechanical engineer and took karate lessons with her on Saturdays. Television was restricted to PBS, and video games were off-limits for Kinkel and her older sister, Jennifer. Instead, Kinkel’s father gave her a microscope, which she used to analyze houseplants and leaves from the backyard. “I was very convinced that there was a specific tree … that had a disease, and I was going to cure it,” she says.

Had it been only the tree that needed curing, things might have turned out very differently. In 1989, Kinkel’s mother, Carolyn, was diagnosed with breast cancer and recovered well after chemotherapy and a mastectomy. Cancer, it seemed to her and her sister, was not life-threatening.

But two years later, it became clear something was wrong with her father, who returned from a business trip looking jaundiced and worn down. He was diagnosed with liver cancer and began chemotherapy. After he had an experimental treatment on the day he was supposed to be discharged from the hospital, a blood clot traveled to his brain and killed him. Kinkel and her sister suspected the worst when their mother returned home alone. It was June 1993, and John Kinkel was 64.

Six months later, the girls learned their mother’s cancer had metastasized to her brain and bones. After months of therapy, and a difficult emotional time at home, she died at age 54—a week before Kinkel’s 15th birthday. Kinkel and her sister stayed with their aunt in Los Angeles, then briefly moved back into their own home. The drama of their childhood made it difficult for the sisters to remain consistently close as they embarked on their own paths, Kinkel says. Her sister lived with a cousin until her early 20s, earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in child development. Meanwhile, after graduating from Irvine High School, Kinkel moved into her own apartment at age 18, ready for independence.

“I was a little bit young and a little bit stubborn,” she says. “The one adjective to describe me is ‘determined.’ ”

Her father had emphasized the importance of higher education, but Kinkel faltered and failed out of a first semester at Orange Coast College, a community college in Costa Mesa. Without her parents, she lacked focus and self-confidence, she says. She eventually returned to the school a year and a half later, excited about the challenge of unraveling scientific mysteries and making an impact on the world—particularly in cancer research. Encouraged by several professors and the dean, she worked as a teaching assistant, tutoring, lecturing for anatomy and physiology classes, and running labs. She also won scholarships, edited textbooks and took leadership roles in science-associated organizations, including chapter president of the Association for Women in Science.

“When you don’t have the unconditional love of parents, when people really believe in you no matter what you do, you don’t want to lose that,” Kinkel says, explaining how motivated she became. “There are times in science when things don’t give you the answers you expect or want, and you go through periods where you just rely on your drive, so it’s important to have those people.”

“Even as a 14-year-old, I knew these events were likely to shape my life, but I could not predict how they would shape my academic career,” wrote Kinkel in her application to MIT.

Months later in Cambridge, Mass., Kinkel reflects on her career during a break from research in the lab of biologist Tyler Jacks, the president-elect of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), whose team is examining the genetic events that contribute to cancer. On a campus notable for its unfashionable overachievers, she appears poised and stylish with a diamond stud in her pierced nose and silver hoop earrings dangling below short brown hair, long bangs brushed to the side. She seems warm, approachable, and well-rounded, passionate about cutting loose on the dance floor one moment and enthralled with her scientific research the next.

“I am very focused on cancer because I feel the most invested in it,” Kinkel says. “But really the problem solving … is what drives me, because I’m not sure if it was just the emotional component that I would make it very far.”

That thoughtfulness and determination, coupled with her intellectual prowess, led to a remarkable transition for Kinkel in the years since her parents’ deaths. From a high school cheerleader who floundered scholastically and worked as a Sizzler restaurant waitress, Kinkel went on to become a research associate at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif. She was accepted everywhere she applied to graduate school, including Princeton and Harvard universities.

Her upward trajectory comes as no surprise to mentor Geoffrey M. Wahl of the Salk Institute. Articulate and mature, she listens and quietly figures out ways around research problems that others consider insurmountable obstacles, he says, adding that her personal losses have given her an “incredible motivation” to succeed.

She transferred from the community college to the University of California–San Diego in 2003 and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology two years later. A summer internship at the pharmaceutical company Merck was followed by a two-year stint in Wahl’s lab, which focuses on the genetic basis of cancer and drug-resistant tumors. Kinkel says she could not resist the opportunity to work with Wahl when she learned his research included studying the disease that took her mother.

“When I was really young, I thought [cancer] was one disease that could just be cured with one single medication, and I was going to find it,” says Kinkel, whose work in the lab focused on identifying and characterizing mammary stem cells. “As I got older, I realized it wasn’t going to be so simple, but I still had that desire to find more beneficial medications.”

Now at MIT, she’s one of 30 students in her biology graduate program. It wasn’t an easy move to Cambridge: She was diagnosed with pancreatitis soon after her arrival and had her gall bladder removed. Immersing herself in the college environment, she lives on campus with a roommate for the first time and studies in coffee shops over soy vanilla lattes, listening to music like Dave Matthews and David Gray (“Stuff that’s sort of mellow and heart-wrenching,” she says).

Despite hours stooped over a microscope, she retains the graceful posture of a longtime dancer—who even now does hip-hop at the Cambridge Dance Complex as part of an effort to keep a well-balanced life outside the lab. In fact, she is such a talented dancer that it could have been an alternate career, says her childhood friend, Kesila Childers.

“Dancing with Stephanie is ridiculous. People form circles around her,” says Childers, 28, who lives in Los Angeles and works for the company that produces MTV’s reality show Real World. “People say, ‘You dance next to Stephanie, you don’t dance with Stephanie.’ ”

Those like Childers who know Kinkel best think it must be very difficult for her to work in cancer research, Kinkel says, and she acknowledges that sometimes they are right. One time, she had to walk out of a conference session on inheritable breast cancer because it hit too close to home: Her mother, her mother’s cousin, and her mother’s mother all had the disease. Even now, she says she’s going to wait a few years to undergo screening for BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene abnormalities, which are associated with an increased risk of developing breast cancer. So is her sister, now 28 and a preschool teacher who recently wrote a master’s thesis on bereavement.

Looking at where they are now, it feels like there was a reason for what happened in the sisters’ lives, and they are proud of each other’s accomplishments, Kinkel says.

“It’s funny how different our directions are, but how similar: One more brain heavy,” she says, and “one more heart heavy.”