I decided to study a bone marrow malignant disease called myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) which frequently evolves to acute leukemia, back in the early 1980s. One decision I made very early on was to concentrate my research on freshly obtained human cells and not to rely on mice or petri dishes alone. In the last 3 decades, I have collected over 50,000 bone marrow biopsies, blood, normal control buccal smear cells, serum and plasma samples in a well annotated Tissue Repository backed by a computerized bank of clinical, pathologic and morphologic data. By using these samples, we have identified novel genes involved in causing certain types of MDS, as well as sets of genes related to survival, natural history of the disease and response to therapy. But when I used bone marrow cells from treated MDS patients to develop a genomic expression profile which was startlingly predictive of response and applied for an NIH grant to validate the signature, the main criticism was that before confirming it through a prospective trial in humans, I should first reproduce it in mice!