Bruce Ratner has led an eclectic life. After focusing much of his undergraduate coursework on math, biology, and physics, he started his career in law and public service as an assistant professor at New York University Law School and Commissioner of Consumer Affairs under Mayor Ed Koch. In his late 30s, he moved into real estate, becoming one of the city's largest developers. Over the course of three decades, his firm developed some of New York's most prominent buildings and fostered the renaissance of the borough of Brooklyn.
In 2016, Ratner's brother, Michael, died of metastatic cancer. Through this tragedy, Ratner came to see that there were scarcely any cures for most advanced cancers, despite headlines regularly implying otherwise. Instead, he realized that early detection was the key to reducing cancer mortality. Following his brother's death, he founded a non-profit, the Michael D. Ratner Center for Early Detection of Cancer, to research and promote better cancer screening. He is on the boards of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Weill Cornell Medical Center, and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Adam Bonislawski is a science writer with ten-plus years of experience covering genomic and proteomic research and diagnostics development with a focus on cancer diagnostics and early detection. He has written hundreds of articles on cancer early detection, covering everything from cutting edge academic research to established companies and technologies and looking at the full range of challenges, from scientific to organizational to financial to societal, involved in developing and implementing new tests for cancer. The publications he writes for, GenomeWeb and 360Dx, are read by thousands of cancer researchers and doctors as well as a wide range of healthcare entrepreneurs and investors, and he has scientific and media contacts at many of the major cancer and academic research centers in the United States and Europe.
