Prizes

 

Cornell University Medical College 50th year reunion

Schedule of Events: 9:30 AM to 11:00 AM: Presentation of Special Achievement Awards

Statement of the Nobel Prize Committee
Bob Dylan's songs are rooted in the rich tradition of American folk music and are influenced by the poets of modernism and the beatnik movement. Early on, Dylan’s lyrics incorporated social struggles and political protest. Love and religion are other important themes in his songs. His writing is often characterized by refined rhymes and it paints surprising, sometimes surreal imagery. Since his debut in 1962, he has repeatedly reinvented his songs and music. He has also written prose, including his memoirs Chronicles.

Tony Fauci graduated first in his class at Cornell University Medical School.

        "Someday, I will be either very rich or very famous. 

        But if I stay at Cornell, I'll be neither."

--attributed to Dr. Fauci

The 50th year reunion of my graduating class will be marked by dinners and events 51 years after our graduation in  few days. 

We started with 90 students, 4 women (one Black woman) and 1 Black man (who had blue eyes and blonde hair), although 2 of the women were gone after the first year.

This is an exercise of looking back, assessing what members of the class accomplished and, in a sense, a statement of the worth of that group and individual members of the class.

E Company of the 101st Airborne had reunions--in that case one can only imagine this band of brothers gathered to remember the trials, victories and losses experienced by the members of this group. Among them was Richard Winters, who most members of this group acknowledged as having offered something special to the group, although I'm not sure they would say he was in any way more valuable than the men he led, that he was any braver or more important when the fighting started. He did his job and they did their jobs. 

Tom Brady is arguably, more important and more valuable compared to the other members of his teams. He was essential, and other players were not. He may have even been more talented, although in many ways he could not match his teammates--he was not the fastest, nor the most intimidating, and everything he did depended on other people doing their jobs, while a wide receiver could simply run by the competition.

So, judging members of a group, even in retrospect, is dicey.

It is important to baseball players to be named to the Hall of Fame, even as they become old men--they want that honor. But then, in baseball, there are lots of records kept of accomplishments for every player who ever set foot on a major league diamond--except, of course, for the Negro League players.

There are between 500,000 to 1 million books published annually in the United States, not to mention songs written, and the Nobel Prize committee could not possibly read all of them, but they could look at Bob Dylan's work over the years and recognize a special talent, and understand the vast influence he had over his and succeeding generations. His pick was the obvious one. He really was the outstanding talent of his time in literature, or at least he was an outstanding talent.

But how do you judge outstanding graduates of a medical school?

I was surprised to learn that Cornell Medical College even had a "first in his class" designation. We were never told our grades and I was not really aware we were assigned grades. During the first two years, when we were confined to classrooms and everyone was taking the same classes and exams, it would have been easy enough to tally the highest scoring students. But, actually, remembering the questions on those exams--"Do fungi have chitin in their cell walls?" one has to ask: Who cares?

Those faculty in the "preclinical years" were astonishingly inept at their jobs. The faculty of Microbiology wanted you to know which bacteria were gram positive or gram negative, but it never occurred to them to discuss how different "gram negative sepsis" was from a gram positive pneumonia.  The course in Pathology had its moments, and one or two faculty who actually knew how to teach, and Physiology was the exception that proved the rule.

The faculty of Physiology actually knew how to teach, and actually had put in some thought about how to convey information and which information was important, worth learning and remembering. Of all those courses in the preclinical years, the concepts of physiology proved useful over the ensuing years and formed a basis for ongoing learning.

But the rest of those two years was a vast wasteland, taught by an ossified faculty incapable of decent teaching.

The emphasis was on isolated "facts" a high percentage of which proved wrong over ensuing years, but the concepts--the heart pumps blood to the brain--endure.

The one professor everyone agreed presented his material in a compelling way was Bean Kean, who taught tropical (parasitic) diseases, a sort of adjunct faculty member, a real showman, who took what could have been a course in extreme arcana an transformed it into a dazzling display of what everyone agreed was the best, most fun course of those years.

When it came to the third year of medical school, the clinical year, where you went on the wards every student experienced that year a little differently. There were rotations in Ob/Gyn, Medicine, Surgery, Pediatrics, Psychiatry and  Neurology, which were required of all students, and then there were electives in orthopedics, urology, and other specialties, and it was understood that most students would not care about certain courses--I had absolutely no interest in Pediatrics, although I later wished I had, once I had children to raise. 

My first and only intimation that the faculty had some idea of my own performance compared to others happened when one of the Deans, Fletcher McDowell, asked me what had happened to me between the 2nd and 3rd year of medical school. I had no idea what he was talking about. 

"During the first two years you were in the middle of the class, maybe just below the midline, but in the third year, you got honors in every subject except Surgery and Pediatrics. Fred Plum gave you honors in Neurology and that happens about once a century."

Some said the first two years showed how intelligent you were and the third year was all about charm and personality.

I did not buy that for a moment. My roommate used to study by propping up his feet on his desk and placing his book in his lap and just reading, no underlining, no jotting things down, just reading. Looking at him you could not tell if he was even awake. But when it came to knowing if fungi had chitin in their cell walls, he was your man. 

When we got to 3rd year Medicine, the resident on rounds stopped outside a patient's door and asked my roommate a question about anemia and he was totally at sea. Then the resident turned to me, and asked about the patient's anemia, and I had a complete outline of anemia in my head--there were the anemias of lack of production of red blood cells and the anemias of loss and destruction of red blood cells, and then I ran down the members of each class and why this patient had blood loss anemia, as was suggested by his positive stool guaiac. 

My roommate, humiliated, flabbergasted, asked me how I did that. I had always studies using outlines, concepts on which to hang important information, so I could recall and use it when faced with patients. He just memorized. So he was a star the first two years, but I could use what I knew. It wasn't a matter of charm. You could not charm your way past Fred Plum, Chief of Neurology.

And so, I had no chance of being first in my class, but why would I care? I learned what I thought was important. I wanted to be able to get patients through the night, alive.

Once we graduated and the diaspora commenced--most graduates left Cornell and headed out all across the country to do their internships and then dispersed yet again when they chose their specialties--I lost track of what happened to my classmates and what they might have accomplished and I had no reason to believe the medical school knew any more about their fates than I did. 

Discovers of Insulin U. Toronto

Sometimes, reading the "Class Notes" in the alumni magazine, I could see some had become faculty members in medical schools, and got prizes for studies of diabetic foot disease or whatever, and one or two became chairmen of departments at prestigious medical schools and written textbooks and articles. But was a chairman of a Department of Medicine more estimable than a local medical practitioner who saw his patients daily in the office and hospital, who met them in the Emergency Room and saw them through their crises? 

I suppose there might be some who had achieved "special achievements" but what could be more special than showing up to bail out a diabetic in ketoacidosis during the night?

Some, like Tony Fauci, 6 years ahead of me, did become rich and famous. But Fauci, for all his virtues, never discovered anything of great moment. He had a lab and would never have been heard from again, until he rose to administrative importance when HIV/AIDS hit. But he was never the moving force Cliff Lane, his colleague in the lab was, and it was not his lab which identified the HIV virus. Nor was it his work which made mRNA the platform for the vaccine that saved the world. 

Fauci was a man who believed he had got where he was by talent, hard work and perspicacity. And he surely had worked hard, but I suspect he lacked insight and the ability to think outside the box, although I'm just guessing about that. Of course, he did the nation a huge service by becoming the voice of reason during a dark time when Trump tried to deny science. Fauci deserved his fame and the adoration of the masses.

But who in our class of 1973 has become its Bob Dylan or its Katalin Kariko, who pursued the mRNA platform for vaccines (and got the Nobel Prize for it) despite being dismissed, fired and demeaned at the University of Pennsylvania?

Who in our class identified a virus like HIV or COVID?

Who in our class deciphered and unveiled the human genome?

Who in our class developed drugs which use the immune system to selectively attack various cancers?

At a recent meeting in Lawrence, Massachusetts I met a man who loudly bragged he was trained by C. Walton Lillehei, who had invented the heart lung machine and taught the men who did the first heart transplants. This man was a graduate of Cornell, 1974. 

And I thought, "Isn't the story of C. Walton Lillehei just the emblematic story of Cornell?" He was hired away from the University of Minnesota and arrived at Cornell like the second coming of the Messiah, but soon the recovery room nurses were saying his patients were too often being rushed back into surgery, or simply not getting off the table alive. 

Operating room nurses agreed--he may have invented the heart lung machine, but he was a surgical catastrophe. Somehow, what medical students were hearing from nurses in the cafeteria did not percolate up to the clinical faculty and people kept referring him patients. Ultimately, he was kicked out when he made the front pages of the New York Times and Daily News, because he had been charged with income tax evasion for writing off payments to Atlantic City prostitutes as "professional expenses."

There you have the true story of the Cornell hierarchy and its capacity to judge worth and value in its progeny and "family."