Leah Speser has been a cowboy in Montana, a law librarian and a professor of various subjects at several universities. She has a law degree and a PhD in political science and is considered one of the founders of technology transfer commercialization in the United States. She supported the science and technology budget contributing to the approval of the International Space Station and helped enact legislation for small companies to access federal funding for research. Now, Speser has chosen to invest in the next generation of cancer and infectious disease researchers.
"I had always wanted to endow a fellowship. I felt postdocs were the deep, unsung heroes of the scientific enterprise," she said.
Fred Hutch Cancer Center has more than 300 trainees, including graduate students and clinical and postdoctoral fellows who are engaged in leading-edge research advancing discoveries in cancer and infectious disease as they develop careers to one day lead their own research.
Speser recently created a nearly $300,000 endowment to support postdoctoral researchers at Fred Hutch. This idea to support the people who “form the next generation of science” was already part of her legacy plans, but with uncertainties in the federal funding landscape, she felt a sense of urgency to act.
“I decided not to wait to make my endowment to Fred Hutch, and I accelerated it because there was a short-term need, and I could make a dent in the short-term need,” she said.
Motivation to act, even in the face of uncertainty, has been a throughline of Speser’s career and personal life.
In the 1980s, she was diagnosed with leukemia.
“They told me I was going to die: ‘There’s nothing you can do,’” she remembered. But Speser wasn’t going to accept that at face value. So she went to the National Institutes of Health’s leading leukemia researcher and asked him what she should do.
“He said, ‘Go to Fred Hutchinson and have Fred Appelbaum transplant you,” Speser said. Frederick Appelbaum, MD, is a physician and executive vice president of Fred Hutch, as well as holder of the Metcalfe Family/Frederick Appelbaum Endowed Chair in Cancer Research. His work has been seminal to the development of bone marrow transplantation as a cure for leukemia and other blood diseases.
Within a few weeks of receiving the advice, Speser became a Fred Hutch patient. Appelbaum conducted the transplant, which was a success. Now, decades later, Appelbaum still remembers it in detail.
“Taking care of Leah was an absolute delight. Our conversations ranged from the enormously entertaining to the deeply thoughtful. Her choice to create an endowment for postdoctoral fellows is typical of Leah: forward-looking, optimistic and generous,” he said.
Cancer-free, Speser became a lifelong Fred Hutch supporter, making annual contributions as she continued her own career, doing things like federal AI research and helping countries abroad design national knowledge transfer systems. But as she watched the funding landscape grow more uncertain for early-career scientists, she decided to make a larger gift that would provide sustainable, long-term funding for them. The next generation of scientists, she said, is not just essential in leading the next generation of transformative discoveries, but also “for the revitalization of economies.”
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At Fred Hutch, postdocs work on leading-edge research in labs across eight research divisions, studying everything from cancer and infectious disease to fundamental biology that helps us understand the molecular basis of disease. They design and run experiments, gather and analyze data and bring fresh perspectives to push science forward in exciting directions.
Examples of work supported by postdocs include research to assess how multilevel factors shape disparities in cancer screenings, expand our understanding of the mechanisms driving different cancer subtypes, and discover new methods to block infections in immunosuppressed cancer patients.
Speser wanted to infuse more support into this work, fueled by her belief that these early-career scientists will ring in tomorrow’s game-changing breakthroughs. To maximize her impact, she also reached out to members of her network and community, who made gifts to the endowment in her honor. And, as someone with a dynamic career with expertise in bridging science and industry, she hoped to offer interested postdocs and Fred Hutch researchers the opportunity to learn from her insights on how to adapt and thrive under shifting conditions. She connected with Fred Hutch’s business development office to lead two seminars.
“What’s happening is a wake-up call,” she said, in reference to the uncertainties around federal funding for science. But every person, she believes, can play a part in addressing those challenges. A donation, she said, is “a measurable, demonstrable shift that creates a measurable, demonstrable outcome.”
The sentiment is echoed in her email signature — a quote, in whimsical font, from the poet Thomas McGrath’s “Letter to an imaginary friend.”
“Bless! Grant them gift and gear,
Against the night and the riding of their needs,
To seed the turning furrows of their light.”
The message resonates with Speser, whose gifts equip others to develop new solutions — in this case, providing postdocs with continued opportunities to ring in future breakthroughs in cancer research.
“You’re not offering a panacea. You’re gifting gear,” she said.
About our Heart of the Hutch series
Much of Fred Hutch’s lifesaving research is possible because of the generosity of its supporters, who continually use their creativity and resourcefulness to raise money for research to prevent and treat cancer and other diseases.
This series highlights just a few of the thousands of Fred Hutch supporters who are the Heart of the Hutch.
Laura Isaza is a writer on the Philanthropy team at Fred Hutch Cancer Center with a background in narrative and audio journalism. Her work has appeared in various outlets, including The Seattle Times, NPR’s All Things Considered, and KALW. Reach her at lisaza@fredhutch.org.
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