ASTROnews: A portrait of Marvin Rotman, M.D., FASTRO

ASTRO established the History Committee in 2002 to document and record the history of radiation oncology in the United States. Committee members David Hussey, M.D., FASTRO, and Gustavo S. Montana, M.D., FASTRO interviewed Marvin Rotman, M.D., FASTRO, in October 2004 during ASTRO’s 46th Annual Meeting in Atlanta. This is a condensed narrative of Dr. Rotman’s interview.

Marvin Rotman, M.D., FASTRO, was born and raised in Philadelphia. At an early age he decided that he wanted to pursue a career in medicine, so he attended Ursinus College and then Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.

Dr. Rotman was introduced to radiation therapy by Dr. Simon Kramer, whom he heard lecture soon after Dr. Kramer came to the United States from England. Dr. Rotman began his training in internal medicine at the Einstein Center in Philadelphia, but after joining the U.S. Air Force, he also practiced internal medicine.

It was during his time in the service that he realized he didn’t want to continue in internal medicine. He always liked looking at X-rays, which sparked his interest in radiology. In 1962, he began a radiology residency at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, N.Y., during the time that Dr. Harold Jacobson was the chair. During this residency, Dr. Rotman was reintroduced to radiation therapy.

Of his beginnings in radiation therapy, Dr. Rotman said, “I found it to be exactly what I wanted as a career.”

After his formal training, Dr. Rotman began his career at New York Medical College, which had a very strong OB/GYN department. One of his colleagues, Dr. Sandy Sall, was very interested in gynecologic oncology, so jointly they cared for many patients with gynecologic malignancies.

Dr. Rotman then moved on to Flower Hospital in Sylvania, Ohio, where he was responsible for treating melanomas of the eye while preserving the eye. At the time, doctors believed melanoma was resistant to radiation, but Dr. Rotman was able to successfully treat the tumors and preserve the eye using cobalt-60 eye plaques. He presented his ocular melanoma cases at a New York Roentgen spring meeting and during the presentation was confronted by an ophthalmologist in the audience who accused him of, “unethical behavior for treating choroidal melanoma with radiation” because that doctor felt that the eye should be enucleated, Dr. Rotman said.

According to Dr. Rotman, the head of pathology at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology began looking into choroidal melanoma and noticed that the patients who had enucleation died of metastases. Dr. Rotman then began lecturing that irradiating the eye and leaving it intact stimulated the production of tumor-associated antibodies.

This controversy eventually led to the Collaborative Ocular Melanoma Study, a multicenter investigation designed to evaluate therapeutic interventions for patients who have choroidal melanoma. Dr. Rotman was responsible for writing the initial radiation grant for the project.

Dr. Rotman was also one of the early members of ASTRO. “It’s thrilling sometimes to come to see some of the work that’s being done. We have a fantastic future,” he said.

He said he remembers “turf wars” in the early days between surgeons, medical oncologists and radiation oncologists and the struggles to have radiation oncology recognized as a separate specialty.

“Juan del Regato was very worried that if we added the word ‘oncology’ to our specialty, ASTRO instead of ASTR, it would dilute our ability to deal with the other specialties. People would think that we were oncologists like medical oncologists. And despite all this, the specialty progressed,” he said.

To read Dr. Rotman’s complete interview as well as interviews with other luminaries in radiation oncology, visit www.astro.org/AboutUs/SocietyHistory/HistoryCommitteeInterviews.

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