South Whidbey alum researches cancer abroad

From the halls of Langley High School to the laboratories of Cambridge, England, one former South Whidbey resident has carved a fascinating path for himself in trying to solve one of life’s greatest riddles – cancer.

A 1977 graduate of the little high school that later became Langley Middle School and is known today as the South Whidbey Community Center, Randall Johnson now finds himself nearly 5,000 miles away from the small Pacific Northwest island he grew up on as he prepares to spend the latter part of his scientific career in Sweden, where he serves on the committee that selects the Nobel Prize.

At the age of 17, Johnson left home – a 10-acre farm near Double Bluff – behind for higher education, driven by the desire to get out of the small-town community.

“I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he said.

He ended up cultivating an interest in studying how the body responds to hypoxia, or low levels of oxygen. His research relates directly to cancer and other diseases.

Johnson explained that cancer cells depend on oxygen to form tumors, since their expansion into a solid mass leads them to use more oxygen than local blood vessels can supply. This leads to hypoxia. Scientists wondered if they could interfere with that process in order to prevent tumor growth.

“As a biologist, for me, I would be so happy if anything I ever did ultimately really impacted clinical approaches to people’s diseases,” he said.

A few years ago, The New York Times covered a study Johnson participated in that explored how exercise might affect immunity to lower cancer risk. The study, which he described as “fun,” combined immune response and exercise in animals and found that they have a better response against cancer after getting more physical activity. T cells – a type of white blood cell that fights cancer – were taken from the exercised animals and given to animals who had cancer, who had a better response than T cells from animals that hadn’t exercised.

When he was offered a professorship at the University of Cambridge, Johnson didn’t hesitate to move abroad to continue his research. About a year later, he accepted an adjunct position at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.

The language barrier didn’t faze him, as Johnson had spent a summer in Sweden on a high school exchange program when he was 15. He learned Swedish and started taking on a bigger role at the medical university.

In 2016, he was asked to join the Nobel Assembly, a committee of 50 professors who select Nobel Prize winners in medicine and physiology every year. Though he has never won the prestigious award himself, Johnson presented the prize in 2019 to a team of scientists who completed research on cancer similar to his own.

He looks forward to attending the award ceremony every year in December, which he compared to the Met Gala. The ceremony is broadcasted on prime-time TV in Sweden for four hours, and there is often much discussion on the preparation of the food consumed by guests.

Johnson joked that the year he brought his mother, Dana Gilroy, to the ceremony put him in a higher ranking than his other siblings. South Whidbey residents may remember Gilroy as a teacher at the elementary school and the first principal of the middle school.

When asked if scientists would ever find a cure for cancer, Johnson had a lot to say on the subject.

“Cancer isn’t just one disease; cancer is hundreds of diseases,” he said. “A melanoma is quite different from a cancer of the throat, which is quite different from a pancreatic tumor, which is quite different from a brain tumor.”

He added that although different types of cancer have similarities of uncontrolled abnormal cell growth, often times they are very different diseases.

“We won’t find one cure for cancer, but I think we’re chipping away at the different forms of cancer bit by bit,” he said.

In his spare time, Johnson writes award-winning poetry. Twice, he has won the nearly 300-year-old Seatonian Prize awarded by the University of Cambridge for the best poem on a sacred subject.

He will soon be leaving Cambridge to work full-time in Stockholm. Yet so far away, he still maintains a connection to Whidbey and often visits the state to see his family.