My Parents and Grandparents.

My maternal grandfather was the owner of a steel mill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, now part of Wheeling Steel. He made quite a number of inventions in structural steel. He died just after World War I from influenza. His wife survived him, but lost most of their wealth in the depression.

My mother has born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1921. She grew up in Pittsburgh during the depression in a large family with another sister and four brothers. She attended college at Hollins College, University of Wisconsin, and Carnegie Tech and majored in physics among other topics. She worked as a probation officer at Allegheny Court Juvenile Court, and as an administrative assistant for various educational, medical and social work organizations. She retired in 1995.

My paternal grandfather was a lawyer in Vienna, Austria specializing in copyright law. He served as an officer of the Austrian-Hungarian Army in World War I and was captured by the Russian Army and placed in a prisoner of war camp in Siberia. The camp was on the sea and in the winter he was allowed to walk out onto the ice for exercise. Once he walked too far out, and a Russian Cossack guard rode out on horse back onto the ice to punish him with a whip. My grandfather glared down the Cossack so fiercely, that he turned around and rode back to the camp without hitting him. Later, during the chaos at the beginning of the Russian revolution, my grandfather escaped across Russia back to Austria. For his book on legislation for Austrian coal mines he received Austria's highest civilian medal, Knight of the Austrian Empire. Just before World War II, he escaped to England, but was imprisoned by the British on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien. A few years after his release he died in London from bladder cancer contracted from chain-smoking.

My father Arnold Reif was born in 1924 in Vienna, Austria. His mother died when ten. As a child, he went skiing at Kitzbuhel, Austria with his governess. In 1936 his English great-granduncle entered him in a Yorkshire boarding school, Giggleswick. During World War II he did his undergraduate work at Cambridge University. After the war, he worked for 3 years at Sheffield University, then went to Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh to earn a DSc in Physical Chemistry. My parents met and were married there, and my older brother Bertrand was born there. Four years after my grandfather died of cancer, my father decided to switch to Cancer Research, and did postdoc work in Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin.

I was born in the University Hospital, Madison, Wisconsin in August 4, 1951. My younger brother Joseph was also born there.

We moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1954 where my father became a Research Associate at the Lovelace Institute. While there, he raced on the 5-man team for Albuquerque in the Southern Rocky Mountain Ski League. This included Santa Fe's team, then run by Ernie Blake, who later founded Taos ski area. In 1957 my family moved to Wellesley, MA, when my father joined Tufts Medical School, where he became an Associate Professor of Surgery. His lab was at Boston City Hospital, and when it became part of Boston University Medical School in 1974, he was asked to stay on as Research Professor of Pathology. My father discovered the first T cell marker, an antigen he named Thy-1. He edited 3 books and published over 100 full-length articles on cancer topics including immunology, viruses and causation, and several articles on sports medicine. He chaired the Ski Committee of the Appalachian Mountain Club, was founding chairman of its Music Committee, and for thirty years participated in the club's white-water kayaking trips. My mother divorced him in 1968 and he remarried in 1979. He retired in 1989, then entered Harvard Divinity School where he earned a master's degree, MTS. He has finished a book on Smoking, and is working on books on Cancer Prevention and on Forgiveness.