This lecture will present a personal story of a 3x cancer survivor and how with the assistance of great coworkers and collaborators an effort has been made to fight back against this disease by studying the chemistry and anti-cancer biology of expanded porphyrins.Expanded porphyrin is a term we introduced into the literature in 1988 to describe larger homologues of natural blood pigments,such as the dyes(e.g.,heme)that make blood red.