August 2013

Life Lessons

Dr. Kenneth Kunz [MD/86] on how he turned a tragedy into an opportunity
as a parent and educator



By Shamona Harnett [BA(Adv)/96]



Dr. Kenneth Kunz’s world came to a startling halt a decade ago when his wife suddenly died, leaving him with an infant and a toddler.
Not only was the former Winnipegger forced to grieve losing the love of his life, he had to learn to be a single father—his two young children’s sole caregiver.
For the oncologist and medicinal chemist—who once developed cancer drugs for a large pharmaceutical company—changing diapers and tending to middle-of-the-night feedings was a foreign concept.
“It's harder than being an oncologist on-call, being a dad. And then you've got two little kids and then, at the same time, [you’re] trying to get over the horrific tragedy of losing the woman that you're in love with, that you worship,” says Kunz, who lived in the United States at the time his wife passed away from complications related to her postpartum depression. 
“[Throughout] that deep wound—you still have to have the presence of mind to love and nurture your children. You have to learn how to cook, shop, clean, sew, comfort.
“I never even considered that I would ever get involved in that.”
But Kunz did.
In fact, he quit his job as a doctor and moved himself and his kids to Nelson, B.C.—population 10, 230—to be near his sister. Since then, he’s been on what he calls a “sabbatical”—a mission to raise his son and daughter, now ages 11 and 13. He plans to return to work in a few years when his children are older.
Meanwhile, the stay-at-home dad and veritable Mr. Mom, earns a living giving public talks about cancer—educating physicians, firefighters and the general public about the disease.  
He’s become a passionate cancer awareness advocate, in particular, lobbying on behalf of firefighters. The group is known to be at higher risk of developing cancer from the fumes they ingest on the job—toxic by-products of the lacquers and plastics used to construct modern buildings.
“Firefighters get them on their skin and breathe them in and swallow them,” says Kunz, 56, who became interested in the firefighter-cancer connection when a B.C. firefighter attending one of his lectures asked him to look into the subject.
He did. The more he investigated the issue, the more fascinated he became. 
And so did firefighters; his presentations on the subject became an instant hit around the province.
“It just took off like wildfire,” says Kunz, who believes firefighters should be screened for cancer at age 40—a decade earlier than the general public.
To create even more cancer awareness among his peers, Kunz has composed a letter firefighters can bring to their family doctors explaining their specific cancer risks and the screening tests he recommends. (See letter at: http://fcabc.ca/Files/cancer%20screening.pdf).
He also believes the turnout gear firefighters wear on the job does not protect them adequately against toxins they encounter.
His drive to help people with cancer traces back to his days as a Winnipeg student.
Kunz grew up in the city’s downtown, attending Hugh John McDonald School and Churchill High School before moving to Toronto to be with his father, who owned a food manufacturing company.
After completing Ontario’s Grade 13, he returned to his hometown to attend the University of Manitoba where he earned his medical degree.
Later, he moved to Arizona, working in internal medicine while at the same time earning his PhD in medicinal chemistry, the science of finding and developing new drugs.
He also became a cancer specialist.
He says U of M gave him the head start he needed.
”I thought, ‘I'm just this kid from Winnipeg. I'm a nobody. The rest of the world is so great. The rest of the world is so accomplished.’ But I got such a phenomenal education at the University of Manitoba,” says Kunz, whose dream of finding a cure for cancer motivated him to study chemistry.
Kunz may not have found the silver bullet to cure cancer, but when he worked for Eli Lilly in the 1990s, he played a major role in writing the clinical trials for Gemcitabine, a cancer drug used to treat lymphoma, pancreatic, breast and ovarian cancers.
“There were a number of other drugs that I worked with as well, but that would probably be the most widely used and exciting drug in that era.”      
Today, Kunz plays his particular part in reducing cancer numbers by educating as many people as he can about preventing the disease, which he believes to be “a natural consequence of living.”
He says 188,000 people are diagnosed with cancer and it kills approximately 87,000 people every year, making it the number one cause of death in Canada and the U.S.
“Cancer is normal. If somebody dies of cancer, it'll say they died of natural causes, because cancer is a normal process just like a stroke or a heart attack or a hemorrhage. Even dinosaurs routinely died of cancer.”
The biggest contributing factors to cancer, according to Kunz? Lack of exercise, eating too much meat and stress.
“We can eat whatever we want and we can eat as much of it as we want. We don't even have to work to get it. We can drive to the supermarket,” says the runner who trains six miles daily and tries to limit his meat consumption to just two meals in a week.
He notes that stress not only creates a cocktail of hormones in the body that can lead to cancer, it also encourages us to engage in unhealthy activities that put our lives at risk.
“Bad stress drives us to things like over eating—which is a really fatal disorder [like] alcoholism, drug addiction and other high risk types of behaviours.”
While prevention is his focus, he can hardly wait to get back to work in a few years helping people who are in the throes of disease.
He’s convinced he will be a better, more compassionate oncologist.
“To be a father was a very difficult thing. It opened my eyes up to what's really going on in the world—the challenges that a woman faces when she is trying to raise children.
“I think it’s done wonders for me in terms of learning how to love people and support them. I think that those are good qualities for a doctor.”

April 2013

Gorillas in Their Midst

By Jeremy Brooks [BA/98]

In the absolute remoteness of northern Canada, a family of wolves watched his every move, and in the thick foliage of a Ugandan forest, a 300-plus pound mountain gorilla ran up to him and gave him a playful punch on the shoulder. 

By letting nature be, Prof. Michael Campbell [BA/80, MA/86] has come to experience it in extraordinary ways. Today he creates tourism and conservation programs focused on protecting the habitats of the world’s charming – and often-endangered – species, so that others might do so as well.

But originally he was focused on a career studying natural processes, not preserving nature. Campbell recalls the spring of 1982, in middle-of-nowhere Yukon, when everything changed. A U of M grad student at the time, Campbell was in the remote region doing research on ice break up.
Captivating as it must have been to watch a frozen gravel-bedded creek thaw, Campbell found himself drawn instead to the animals watching him. In his downtime, he and his fellow investigators took regular hikes to explore their surroundings. More and more, Campbell’s love for the nature around him – like the wolves, lynxes, caribou and an eager bunch of porcupines he saw squeaking and frolicking on a lakeshore as they got ready to mate – bubbled up to the surface. 

“That really got me thinking, you know, protecting these places is really important,” recalls Campbell, who today is a professor at the Natural Resources Institute in the Clayton H. Riddell Faculty of Environment Earth, and Resources. “That’s what spurred me to start studying parks and protected areas.” 

Building a career around his desire to protect natural places, and their charismatic ‘locals’, has since taken Campbell around the world to collaborate with various like-minded partners, including Makarere (Mack-kay-ray-ray) University in Uganda. For six years from 2006 to 2012 he worked with Makarere University graduate students and local communities that surround sites like Bwindi Impenetrable National Park pairing conservation with tourism. The goals of the partnership were to demonstrate how to create tourism opportunities that benefit the people of these rural communities and establish a tourism curriculum for the university to keep the momentum going. All this in the interest of protecting the country’s unique wildlife, which includes the last stronghold for the endangered mountain gorilla. 

Uganda is about one-third the size of Manitoba with a current population of about 34 million, notes Campbell. He cites estimates that suggest that figure could explode to as high as 150 million by 2050 based on the country’s current fertility rate. Such a spike in the need for land – to live on and to feed off of – creates the encroachment challenge that threatens places like Bwindi, a UNESCO World Heritage site that covers about 320 square kilometres and is home to more than 300 mountain gorillas. 



Up close and personal with a mountain gorilla

Campbell and his colleagues showed communities how they could benefit from protecting parks and surrounding areas, which host gorilla safaris and are a magnet for ‘birders’ wanting a glimpse of rare species like the African green broadbill. Then he got them to come up with their own ideas about what they could do to attract tourists and achieve their desired economic benefit. Each community had the choice of contributing money, land or labour to the development. In exchange, they got assistance from experts relevant to the project of their choosing. 

For the villagers of Ruhija who opted to build a tented camp to address the absence of nearby accommodations for tourists, help included a landscape architecture student from Canada, tours of similar tented communities in Uganda, building materials and furnishings, and lessons on sanitation, cooking and menu development from one of the country’s top culinary arts instructors. Today the camp is a success, one Campbell recommends for anyone planning on visiting the area.



Rujiha tented camp, one of the projects Prof. Campbell and colleagues at
Makerere University helped the community establish

But it’s on the outskirts of Queen Elizabeth National Park, in the village of Katanguru, that you’ll find the community collaboration project that surprised Campbell the most: a hostel built for Ugandan school children Grades 7 through 10 who come to the region every year as part of the mandated education curriculum to study wildlife, national parks and conservation. Katanguru is very poor and made up primarily of women who – save one with a Grade 6 equivalent – have no education, says Campbell. Their first hurdle, he recalls, was determining what kind of project the group even had the means to complete. The women answered that question with the hostel idea, and from there Campbell and his partners negotiated with the park the transfer of an old sand quarry to redevelop as such.
It took five more years of Campbell and graduate students from Makerere working with the community before the idea became a reality. One of the biggest challenges he recalls was keeping spirits up in the village when it felt like they would never have a completed project to call their own or benefit from. As of early 2013, Campbell expected the group would be seeing its first students at any time. 
“To see them actually doing this, and successfully, that’s probably the most exciting part of all,” says Campbell, who is director of the U of M’s Natural Resources Institute. 

Much of his work benefits people in different parts of the world, but the knowledge Campbell brings back to Manitoba is applicable in his own backyard. And the lesson he hopes to teach is universal.
 “I often use the example of in Manitoba in particular, we are a lot like Uganda when it comes to tourism,” he says. “We have one, major internationally known tourist attraction. It happens to be another charismatic species; we have polar bears. Understanding how they can be preserved through responsible tourism is the message. What can we do through responsible tourism to ensure those species continue in perpetuity?”  
 
 
More from Michael


Childhood inspiration: “When I was younger, and it’s interesting because I don’t do anything aquatic, it was Jacques Cousteau. I think it was just the exposure to the natural world and the fact that he was working where he wanted to work. I found the beauty and the feeling of being completed when I was in the Yukon, and it really made me see how I could do the same thing.”


Best piece of advice: “Do what you want to do. I think if you do that, regardless of whether you get financial rewards or not, you’re going to be happy.”


An experience in nature he’s never forgotten: “Canoeing on the Seal River [just north of Churchill, Man.] was absolutely stunning. I remember one rapid that went around a 90-degree corner with a large cliff on the right hand side. As we’re going down, I looked back and you can see the slope of the water. You can see two-and-a-half and three-foot standing waves … and coming through the waves are seals porpoising upstream. It was just a surreal experience.”
What’s next: “We’ve had some contact with some people in India with respect to [conservation of] the Himalayan wolf and, obviously, tigers. It’s a totally different interaction between people and tigers whereas when you’re dealing with gorillas, they are generally benign. They may eat crops, which can have a significant impact on peoples’ livelihoods, but they don’t eat the people.”

Learning from Experience

By Jeremy Brooks [BA/98]



We learn by doing. If you want to play guitar, you can read up on it, sure, but it’s the time you spend with your fingers on the fret board that will make you a guitarist. 
The same can be said for students at the U of M pursuing careers in areas like international development. Striking out into the world as part of their education is vital.
Thanks to the Students for Development (SFD) program, that’s exactly what six U of M undergrad students will do for three months [May through July] in the forests of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil.

Spearheaded by Prof. Wilder Robles – himself a product of international education having left his native Peru to study in Brazil, Ohio and British Columbia – the SFD program pairs U of M students with colleagues from Dom Bosco Catholic University in Brazil and the Indigenous Guarani people. 
Nine thousand kilometres removed from the comfort and familiarity of the U of M campus, students live and work with the Guarani – who like many Indigenous people around the world have seen modern society eradicate their livelihood and culture. The goal of their collaboration? To identify secure food sources, develop activities and practices that will safeguard the future of their children and youth, and explore community-based programs to fuel economic growth.
Robles, an assistant professor in the department of family social sciences, described the power of studying abroad in terms of an awakening. 
“We awaken the curiosity, the intellectual curiosity and the vocational orientation, and that’s really important,” says Robles. “That’s why I encourage all students to go abroad. Because you discover yourself, who you are and what you would like to do in life.”

Last year in 2012, Robles took his first group of SFD students to Mato Grosso do Sul. Not only did it result in the development of research-backed recommendations that the Guarani can use to lobby the Brazilian government for policy changes around land use, land ownership and other issues critical to their future, it opened the students’ eyes to the truth behind poverty in Indigenous communities; the one they can only see once they’ve lived it.  



“They begin to understand the complexity of being poor,” says Robles. “They understand they are poor not because they are lazy or anything like that. It’s the structures of power in society, you see, which keeps those people poor.”
But it’s not a one-way street. During the three-year run of the SFD program, three students from Dom Bosco Catholic University will come to the U of M as well, where they will work with some of Manitoba’s First Nations communities.

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