Produced by AusDoc on behalf of COSA

PROFESSOR BOGDA KOCZWARA closed off COSA’s 50th Annual Scientific meeting with a moving and inspiring Presidential Address in which she used the parable of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as an analogy for how the “cancer apocalypse mirrors life”.

The former COSA president paid tribute to her mentors, to the great cancer innovators of the past 50 years and to Flinders University, which had found a way to accommodate her when she arrived in Australia in 1983 as a refugee from Poland with one year of medical school under her belt.

Noting that there are 100 million cancer survivors alive today, she raised the challenges of survivorship and expressed gratitude for the opportunity to be part of her patients’ stories. “I have seen my patients marry and divorce, become parents and grandparents, change jobs, move countries, make movies
and publish books,” she said.