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Early Life
Marc Straus is the son of Samuel Straus (1914 – 1985) an Ashkenazi Jewish Polish immigrant from Sambor (now in the Ukraine), who came to New York impoverished at age 15. His mother had died when he was three months old. His mother, Dora Straus (1918 – 2008) was a daughter of immigrants from Austro-Hungary. Her father worked as a tailor in Brooklyn, NY. In 1943 Samuel opened, Roman Cotton Goods, a wholesale textile store on the corner of Grand and Eldridge Streets on Manhattan’s Lower Eastside. From age 5 – 25 Marc worked in the store most Sundays and many summers and sold textiles full time from age 9. This early life experience was to inform much of his business career.

In 1946 the family moved to West Hempstead, Long Island where Marc attended public school. At age 10 he and his seven-year-old brother, Stephen, commuted to Yeshiva Central Queens, an orthodox Jewish school with heavy emphasis on Talmud. Yet the family was very secular. Marc’s experiences there and through age 12 are the subject of a forthcoming memoir, ONE-LEGGED MONGOOSE. Even before age 10 Marc became a prodigious baseball card collector and from that time he was to build various collections until age 20 when he focused exclusively on contemporary art.

At age 14 Marc and Stephen commuted to Brooklyn to Yeshiva of Flatbush. Stephen was small and cerebral and picked on by bullies and anti-Semites from a very young age and Marc became a skilled street fighter which was to manifest itself in several ways later.

In High School, first day, he met Livia Selmanowitz, great daughter of a rabbi who headed a Hassidic sect in Brooklyn. In their senior year they began dating and were married in 1964, at age 20.

Academic and Medical Career
Marc attended Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA (1961-1964) where he majored in history and earned an A.B. Marc attended SUNY Downstate Medical Center (1964- 68), and earned an M.D. He was a medical intern at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, NY and 1969 – 71, was a Research Fellow in Drug Research and Development at the National Cancer Institute. It was here that he formulated ground-breaking cancer drug studies in mice which established optimal ways of combining different drugs, with a number of publications in lead cancer research journals. In 1971-72 he was a medical resident at Barnes Hospital, Washington University, in St. Louis. Here he devised the first combination chemotherapy trial for patients with Small Cell lung cancer thought then to be a rapidly growing untreatable disease. He noted a high remission and this ground- breaking approach became the basis for many other trials. In 1972- 74, he was a clinical oncology fellow at the National Cancer Institute and at the same time, Head of The Laboratory of Cell Kinetics from which he published numerous papers on the growth of human cancers and methods to optimize treatment. He also was executive officer for various national lung cancer trials. In 1971 at age 28, he edited the first of three textbooks on lung cancer which for many years was the standard text. At age 30 he was recruited as Chief of Oncology and Associate professor of Medicine at Boston University Medical Center where his clinical and research work focused primarily on breast and lung cancers. His work resulted in more sophisticated ways of determining the prognosis of breast cancer. He related outcomes to rate of cell growth and presence of hormone receptors which became the basis of future thinking.

1978 – 1982 he was Professor of Medicine and Chief of Oncology at New York Medical college and Westchester Medical Center where he continued his clinical and laboratory research studies. In all Dr. Straus published some 100 scientific papers in lead journals.

1982 – 2008 he headed Access Medial Group, a multi-specialty group in the Hudson Valley in NY, which ultimately had 36 doctors. In addition, in 1997 he was founder of a medical management company which managed some 300 doctors in New York.

From 1982 – 2008 Marc Straus headed the oncology program at a number of suburban hospitals in the Hudson Valley including Yonkers, White Plains and Carmel, NY. He has won a large number of grants and prizes for his medical and research work. He is the recipient of The Boston Young Leader Award previously given to John F. Kennedy.

He is a member of numerous prestigious societies including a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a Member of the American Association of Cancer Research.

Business Man
Aside from his highly successful practice and medical management company in 1982 Marc started CarePlus, a public company and one of the first two home nutrition companies in the U.S. While Dr. Straus no longer managed the company after inception it grew to a market cap of $1B. In 1983 he founded Medical Registry Services, a software company providing cancer registry software support for hospitals. In became the largest provider in the industry. In 2008 he and his son, Ari, founded MDINR, a software company which supported doctors treating patients with the anti-coagulant, Coumadin. Coumadin is taken by some 5 million Americans and severe toxicity and even death are frequent. The company was purchased in 2010 and the software now dominants the industry and is used by tens of thousands of doctors and nurses.

==Jewish Activism and Self Defense

In 1969 when Dr. Straus arrived at The National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD. The Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were both far left wing activist organizations. That year Jews were being threatened in Russia with a number of arrests. At the same time members of the American Nazi Party were effectively disrupting Jewish rallies in Washington in support of Russian Jews. In response Marc and Livia Straus founded JACA, the Jewish Athletic and Cultural Association which taught karate and gave seminars on Jewish topics. The karate school competing in national tournaments and in 1977 Marc coached the US Karate team at the Maccabee games in Israel. Marc had won a NY City Judo gold medal while in Medical school and now also had a black belt in karate. While the JACA never espoused violence and civil disobedience as did the Jewish Defense League it nonetheless came under the close scrutiny of the FBI. During those years JACA members did confront the American Nazi Party who then no longer disrupted rallies.

Contemporary Art
Marc and Livia Straus began collecting contemporary art by 1966. Marc worked weekend jobs while in Medical school for their purchases which were primarily works of new artists or artists whose work had no market such as Ellsworth Kelly. Over the ensuing years they did many thousands of studio visits around the world focusing on new talent. Their collection has been the subject of nine museum tours including at the Knoxville Museum and Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, VA. The collection has been featured in over 50 major articles worldwide including The NY Times, Forbes, Harper’s Bazaar, Contemporanea, Art & Antiques, and ArtNews. The collection has been listed in Art & Antiques as one of the Top 100 collections in the US.

Marc Straus has given scores of lectures around the world on building collections and he has written some 35 articles in leading publications on art collecting and art criticism.

In 2002 Marc and Livia founded a public museum, The Hudson Valley Center of Contemporary Art, in Peekskill, NY. Its focus was on exhibiting emerging artists from around the world and supporting a highly economically challenged area by with innovative education programs. Peekskill, a Hudson River waterfront town has had a remarkable renaissance with downtown now busy and many artists and young families moving there, and the percentage of High School students going onto college has doubled. HVCCA has been widely credited for being the main ingredient of this renaissance. At the same time HVCCA has shown over 100 international artists for the first time in a museum who then went on to prominence.

In 2011 Marc opened MARC STRAUS, a contemporary art gallery on Grand Street, NYC across the street from where his father’s store had been. The gallery represents 18 artists from 11 different counties. Most of the artists were new to the market and more recently some are renowned artists where the gallery is introducing their new work to the market. In 2014 Flashart listed MARC STRAUS as among the top 100 galleries in the world. The gallery participates in leading art fairs, in the US, Singapore, Hong Kong, Brussels, Mexico City and Madrid.

Public Service
In 1990 – 2000 he was President of the Board of the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, CT. From 2004 to the present he is Chairman of the Board of HVCCA. From 1994 – 2004 he was a Trustee at Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA. He has taught classes at a number of synagogues and museums.

Poet and Writer
In 1991 Marc took a workshop at the NYC 92nd Street Y with poet Thomas Lux. In 1992 Marc received a Yaddo Fellowship in poetry at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY. Marc’s poem quickly gained acceptance to many of the leading literary magazines in the US. By now he has published in 100 journals including Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and TriQuarterly. He has three poetry collections published by TriQuarterly Press – Northwestern University Press: ONE WORD (1994), SYMMETRY (2000), NOT GOD (2006). He has read his poetry at numerous venues including University of Michigan, NYU, Franklin & Marshall College, and Sarah Lawrence College. Some 200 poems have been published. His poetry often deals with doctor patient communication and many poems are in the voices of patients or doctors. His poetry has been used in the teaching curricula of many medical schools and training programs. NOT GOD, a play in verse has been produced on stage at eight different venues including a run at LUNA Stage, NJ in 2009. Marc’s poetry has been anthologized many times and he is the recipient of numerous writing prizes including the Robert Penn Warren Award lecture in the Humanities form Yale.

Marc is currently completely a memoir trilogy, the years he was four and five, and then ten to twelve and the final book, ages 14 – 20. These works are spoken in the first person by the child. The work is with Lisa Leshne Agency. He is the author of several published short stories.