The Road

 after years of intense investigative research by a collaborative team led by Molly Moravian, a brilliant and intrepid female physician. She perseveres despite numerous fiendish attempts by greedy big Pharma, the desperate aims of rogue colleagues, and the Mafia to steal her intellectual property. The plot is woven with history, intrigue, romance, and humor.

The story opens during the last half of the 20th century in the crumbling New England seaport of New Bedford. Molly’s childhood explores influences from the dual ethnic background of her Armenian and Jewish grandparents. She shares time with her father, Eddy, at his luncheonette, with its back-room numbers racket, as he becomes ensnared and controlled by the New England Mafia. A key Mafioso protects Eddy and becomes an integral character throughout the lives of his family.

As a student intern in the Ivory Coast, Molly learns something unusual about cancer that transforms her career focus as a medical researcher. During her medical training, she and a fellow student, Aaron, have an unplanned, passionate scene in the laboratory cold room, resulting in a broken agar plate that leads them to challenge the enigmas of cancer and its causes. They grow together, personally and professionally, and eventually marry.

The narrative moves into its final setting of Boston, M.I.T., and Harvard Medical School. Molly painstakingly assembles a diverse collaborative team of researchers in their pursuit of a cancer cure. The team’s detailed scientific methods and state-of-the-art techniques in the laboratory are highlighted over several years, tracing the intricacies of their quest toward a realistic and believable journey…the cure for cancer. Molly’s groundbreaking team survives numerous disappointments, devastating setbacks, and mistakes, which only serve to strengthen the mettle of this strong and dedicated female oncology investigator. Woven throughout the scientific/medical advances on the march to a cure are true-to-life, heartwarming struggles of cancer patients and their loved ones, including Molly’s best friend and a kind-hearted gangster.

A surprise ending ties together this tender, emotional, ethnically charged story.

Thomas L. Goodman was born and raised in Rhode Island. 

He has practiced oncology/hematology for more than 40 years. His education and training include Johns Hopkins University, Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Rhode Island Hospital, the leading teaching hospital of Warren Alpert School of Medicine of Brown University, and Beth Israel Hospital, a Harvard Medical School teaching institution in Boston. 

He was an attending oncologist/hematologist at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and a clinical associate professor in Medicine at Albany Medical College. He has been involved in laboratory and clinical research studying bleeding, clotting disorders, and cancer-related pharmacology. 

Dr. Goodman was co-medical director of Community Hospice and is currently the medical director of Ferre Genetics. He is retired from his 32-year private practice in the Capital Region of New York.

The author lives with his wife, Cynthia, in Upstate New York. He is always happy to boast about his three daughters, all of whom are physicians.