She was curating a cancer exhibit when her own mom got diagnosed
Science Museum in London aims to help people talk candidly about the increasingly common disease
When staff at the Science Museum in London, U.K., started planning their exhibit about cancer, they knew there was a good chance that people on their team would be personally affected by the disease.
After all, around 40 per cent of North Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their life, according to data from cancer charities in Canada and the U.S. And it's one of the leading causes of death worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.
Still, it came as a shock to Katie Dabin, the museum's curator of medicine, when her own mother was diagnosed with breast cancer while Dabin was in the middle of planning the exhibition.
"It was a strange and unsettling experience," Dabin told As It Happens guest host Tom Harrington. "It was an upset I didn't expect. Hard for it to be my mum."
But it also gave her an up-close view of how far cancer treatment has progressed over the course of human history. Her mother was diagnosed early, underwent surgery, and recovered. She is now cancer free.
It's exactly this kind of story of medical achievement the museum hopes to showcase with Cancer Revolution: Science, Innovation and Hope, running now through January 2023.
"It absolutely was testament to the fact that there is brilliant cancer care and treatment available when it's diagnosed early enough," Dabin said. "We're so thrilled and thankful, but it was definitely surreal."
We need to create spaces where people feel equipped to have conversations with their friends and family about experiences that... are ever-increasingly happening to us.- Katie Dabin, curator of medicine at the Science Museum, London
'Cancer is a tough sell for a family day out'
The exhibit takes a deep dive into the history and science of cancer, highlighting how the disease has been treated and understood over time.
Some of the items on display tell stories of triumph, hope and life-saving advancements in medical technology.
Others, she said, highlight the "stark reality" that many people have, and continue, to face when dealing with cancer's painful, and often deadly, effects.
Dabin admits it's not what people might expect from a day at the museum.
"Cancer is a tough sell for a family day out," she said, adding that staff have tried to make the space as warm and welcoming as possible.
"I think we need to create spaces where people feel equipped to have conversations with their friends and family about experiences that, you know, are ever-increasingly happening to us."
A way to visualize treatment journeys
Many of the items on display are deeply personal. Early on, the staff put out a call to the public to ask them to share objects of personal significance to their own cancer journeys.
"Visitors will see some beautiful portraits of these individuals and their particular objects," said Dabin.
One of those objects is a string of beads that represents a young cancer patient's treatment journey. Ted Drummond was diagnosed with leukemia when he was just six months old and after two years of treatment, he left the hospital without a good way to share his experience with others.
"He has needed a tool to talk to his family, to talk to his friends, to his teachers, to explain, you know, what happened to him," Dabin said.
"Each bead represents a moment on Ted's treatment journey. So that's something like 600 beads representing his days in isolation, the red beads representing blood transfusions, white beads for chemotherapy."
The beads are due to the efforts of the charity Beads of Courage UK, started by Ted's family and two others, which aims to raise awareness of childhood cancers and give young patients a way to share their experiences.
That's also one of the goals of the Science Museum's new exhibit. Dabin said she hopes that the exhibit can help visitors turn a more hopeful lens on cancer.
"Up until fairly recently, the outcomes haven't been great. But in the last 30, 40 years, there really has been a huge difference where more than half of individuals diagnosed with cancer live for 10 years or longer, you know, often cured of cancer — like my mum, thankfully," Dabin said.
"But what we do need to do is to keep having that conversation so that people are more aware, people feel more comfortable talking about it, [so] there's less stigma, there's less confusion and misconceptions.
"So it's really important to create the space, to have hope and have those conversations."
Written by Sheena Goodyear with files from Olsy Sorokina. Interview with Katie Dabin produced by Kate McGillivray.
