CR | Page No. 20 | Summer 2009
Yet remarkably, she recovered,
and lived to age 72.
Komaki and her family—her
parents, a brother and a sister—
moved to Hiroshima two years
later to help care for relatives.
Many of the city’s children were
orphans, and food was often
scarce. Here, growing up in the
shadow of nuclear holocaust,
Komaki developed a lifelong
fixation on the power of radiation.
She studied everything she could
find about photons and subatomic
particles. She read and reread
biographies of Marie Curie, a
pioneer in the science of radiation,
who became her lifelong hero.
In middle school, she met
classmate Sadako Sasaki. Her
friend was an athlete, a champion
runner. Yet the next year, when
both girls were 10, Sadako seemed
continually out of breath. She was
diagnosed with radiation-induced
leukemia and died months later.
Sadako’s death became the
defining event in Komaki’s life. She
had always been one to feel loss
to her core; once, as a schoolgirl,
after finding a mortally wounded
bird, she dug the animal a small
grave and held her own private
ceremony. Though Komaki had
witnessed sickness all around her,
Sadako’s death made little sense.
Her grandmother had survived
the radiation unscathed; yet
her friend, who was seemingly
more full of life than any of
her classmates, did not. She
vowed then to become a doctor,
to understand the frightening
randomness of disease, and cure
leukemia.
Komaki could not have known
that decades later she would be
a cancer specialist in the United
States, using radiation—which
had devastated so many around
her—to heal. Now 65, she heads
the section of thoracic radiation
oncology at M. D. Anderson Cancer
Center in Houston. She is a slight,
gentle-spoken woman, barely
over 5 feet tall, who nonetheless
fills a room with the intensity of
someone much larger.
“If I had never met Sadako, I
don’t think I would be a radiation
oncologist,” Komaki says. “She
always lives with me.” Before
she died, Sadako heard a legend:
An ill person who makes 1,000
origami cranes will reclaim her
health. As she lay dying, the girl
Ritsuko Komaki’s childhood friend
in Hiroshima died of radiation-induced leukemia. Today, she
uses radiation to help treat cancer
patients in the United States.
