Memorial Sloan Kettering
The Kristen Ann Carr Center for Sarcoma Research
Built on a $10 million commitment completed in 2023. Its associated laboratories include the Cristina Antonescu Lab, the Sam Yoon Lab and the Samuel Singer Lab.
What he did, away from the typewriter
Kristen
Kristen Ann Carr was diagnosed with sarcoma at nineteen. She died on January 3, 1993, at twenty-one. The fund that carries her name was established at her own request, six months later, in June 1993.
Sarcoma is rare — a cancer of bone and soft tissue that strikes the young far out of proportion to its overall numbers, and which in 1993 had almost no dedicated research money behind it and very little in the way of care designed for the adolescents and young adults it hits hardest. That is the gap the Carr family set out to close, and the thing they understood from the start was that it could not be closed from any single direction. So the fund went at it from all of them at once: paying for laboratory research, endowing the training of the surgeons and oncologists who would spend their careers on the disease, and paying for the unglamorous things that make a cancer ward survivable — a social worker, a coffee house, a program that grants wishes, musicians at the bedside.
Marsh's particular contribution was the one he was uniquely placed to make. He and Barbara Carr knew everyone in the music business, and they asked. Bruce Springsteen headlined a benefit at Madison Square Garden in June 1993 that raised $1.5 million on its own. Pete Townshend, Barbra Streisand and Don Henley gave the fund proceeds from shows. What began as a Halloween party at a club in Manhattan became A Night to Remember, an annual event that has run for three decades and honored, among others, Springsteen and Patti Scialfa, Jon and Barbara Landau, Steven and Maureen Van Zandt, and the photographer Danny Clinch.
The results are on the wall of a hospital. The Kristen Ann Carr Sarcoma Laboratory opened at Memorial Sloan Kettering in 2008 — the first comprehensive research center dedicated to sarcoma anywhere. In 2015 the fund pledged to build the Kristen Ann Carr Center for Sarcoma Research; in 2023 it announced that the $10 million commitment behind it was complete. Since 1994 it has endowed a named fellowship every single year without a break, and the doctors who came through it now run sarcoma programs across North America.