My Career in Science - Karlman Wasserman -- TOC
Living History Project � Karlman Wasserman, Ph.D., M.D.
00:02:09 Karl how did you get into Princeton at age 17?
00:03:25 And you studied engineering that first year?
00:03:38
Then you came back from you active duty and went through three years of what you
might call more traditional college, and got your degree at again a very young
age.
00:04:53 So
starting out in the North East where you were born in New York and the went to
college in New Jersey and also New York, you then went down all the way to
Tulane to get your Ph.D. and you M.D. What compelled you to go that far south?
00:05:45
After you go you Ph.D., you then spent three or four years doing research and
teaching and then decided to go to medical school?
00:07:28 Who
were the mentors that you can remember, sixy years ago, fifty five years ago,
that really guided your career into Physiology and then into Medicine?
00:09:40 So
the availability of radio isotopes must have made a huge advance in Physiology
and research, and the best explanation for the availability of radioactive
substances is that they came out as an offshoot of the Manhattan Project. In
other words they became very interested in isotopes by smashing atoms or I don�t
remember that there was very much research using radio isotopes prior to the
post WWII era.
00:11:16 And
its interesting to note that even though you turned down Henry Wagner in
Baltimore that you did work on pulmonary embolism using the lung scan with Dr.
Sarwar and others here at Harbor. How did that come about? Was that still
because of you communication with Henry Wagener or did that spontaneously
appear?
00:13:13 Can
you tell us something about why you went to New England and what you were doing
along the coast line there?
00:15:56 I
understand you eat pretty well during those times. Could you tell us a little
bit about you childhood and you family in New Jersey?
00:17:13
This suggests your diversity of interest in the development of you career; that
there�s hardly an organ system that escaped you and your collaborators.
00:24:25
Since I was a Stanford grad I have a great deal of interest of what you did at
Stanford even though I was gone by the time you got there. Did you continue to
communicate with Dr. Comroe in San Francisco when you were working at Stanford,
realizing of course that Stanford and California are bitter rivals at least on
the football field?
00:30:30
Let�s get back to Stanford because one of the things that is very strong at
Stanford is a collaboration with industry and not the evil industry of
Pharmacopeias but the industry that is developing instruments the
Hewlett-Packard and Ovarian associates in the Silicone Valley that grown up with
all of the computer power in the area around Stanford, a lot of it fueled by
Stanford and Stanford graduates and drop outs for that matter. But how did that
work into your research; the collaboration with industry?
00:36:32
Managing Pulmonary Alveolar Proteinosis, how did you get involved with that and
why don�t we do it any more in Harbor?
00:40:30
Karl you had a remarkable to attract Physiology physicians from all over the
world and United States for you training program and you have mentored many. Can
you tell us a little about why this has been so successful; did you follow
Julius Comroe in that regard?
00:44:52 So
there are individuals who come here for a few days but there are many others
that come for 2 years or there about?
00:46:12
It�s interesting how the anesthesiologist have become interested in the concept.
00:48:12
Just this last week 2 anesthesiologists were here from London and they expressed
that this was almost universal now for their abdominal aneurisms and for
esophageal cancer in elderly individuals that was a required thing to get an
exercise test. Not only the anesthesiologist but also the surgeon where now
demanding this in order to assess survivability.
00:50:35
Tell us how you showed that lactate is not all bad.
00:55:12 How
did you take over that aspect of Cardiopulmonary care where you actually
expanded out of Pulmonary function test into the care of patients who are
critically ill?
00:58:40
This is a lesson that I�ve learned over the years that there is less and less
Physiology taught in Medical School, much more Pharmacology taught in medical
schools; many new things that we didn�t have to learn back when were in Medical
school, but one of the things that�s being left out of the curriculum is a good
immersion in Physiology. And despite all your efforts as a leader in the
marriage between Physiology and Medicine, I think the physiology part is
dropping out of medicine as we speak.