|
Senior Physiologists' News |
|
Letter to Julio Cruz
Dudley F. Rochester writes: “I received your letter last month, but have been away from Charlottesville most of the last four weeks. I apologize for the delay in answering, and hope it is not too late. “I retired as Head, Division of Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Virginia School of Medicine in 1993 and was made Professor Emeritus. I stayed on an extra year to help with clinical work, but left in 1994. “From 1995 to 1997 I participated in a study of exercise dyspnea and catechol amines at the Salem, Virginia Veterans Medical Center, but we could not get the paper published. At the same time, I began to volunteer with the American Lung Association of Virginia. “I served on the board of America Lung Association of Virginia from 1995 to 2002, serving as president 2000-2002. I served on the national board of the American Lung Association 1999-2002. In 2003-2004 I was on the board of the Virginia Conservation Network, and from 2004-2007 I was on the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality State Advisory Board – Air Pollution. I prepared an extensive report “Air Pollution and Health” that has estimates of economic as well as medical costs. It can be found at the web site http://www.deq.state.va.us/air/sabrpts.html. “In 2008 I was elected to the vestry of St. Paul’s Memorial Church in Charlottesville and also serve on environmental committees at St. Paul’s and at Westminster Canterbury of the Blue Ridge where I live. I am deeply concerned about global warming, climate change and supplies of fresh water. Because I wish to minimize travel, I prefer to work on these issues in Charlottesville, through my church and retirement community.“ Frank G. Moody writes: “What a pleasant surprise and pleasure to receive a birthday greeting on my 80th from the American Physiological Society through you. I have had a very close relationship to the organization over the years, and have worked with and for many of its illustrious members. I thought that I might best initiate an abbreviated biosketch. As you will note, I remain on the full time faculty of the University of Texas Medical School in Houston as a Professor of Surgery. My primary role is to relate to the teaching and practice of medicine and surgery at many levels in whatever will best benefit the learners (as well as the more junior teachers). This is not only a great privilege, but also fun. My primary interest over the years has been to care for patients with digestive diseases, and try to bring them back to a more normal state by surgical interventions. While the classroom has been the clinic and operating room, I have maintained a keen interest in the origins of gastrointestinal disease and their physiologic consequences. My bibliography in a way suggests that I am a dabbler, but in defense of that image I moved along from peptic ulcer disease, to gallstones, to pancreatitis, to intestinal permeability, to obesity as my clinical practice demanded. I have been active in the laboratory throughout my career, and continue to participate as a co-investigator on a clinical study with Heinrich Taegtmeyer on the metabolic effects of obesity on the heart. I was able to receive very generous funding from the NIH for almost forty years, and maintained an active laboratory throughout that period of time. I used the laboratory not only for discovery but also for recruiting surgical residents and medical students into academic surgery. One of the most satisfying aspects of my career has been the number of students who have worked with me who have gone on to assume major chairs of surgery and leadership roles in their various specialties to include community practice. Our laboratory approach used what would be considered now the ‘bunsen burner, smoked-drum kymograph’ approach. We did upgrade rapidly as new techniques became available, and I was able to keep up by collaborating and associating with several outstanding physiologists at the various institutions that I have been at. In fact, my move from the Chair at Utah to the Chair of Surgery at UT Houston was related to an opportunity to work with the outstanding Department of Physiology headed by Stan Schultz, and the School itself to be headed by Ernie Knobil, both former Presidents of the APS. My closest association however has been with Norm Weisbrodt, not only an outstanding scientist and teacher, but a great person to be around. I emphasize to my associates how important it is for us to work in close collaboration with the basic scientists. It is no longer possible to be a one man/woman show. Collaborative research, using all the tools available is the only way to move forward, and even then, the progress is slow. I also encourage individuals who want to pursue a career in academic surgery to spend at least two years in a basic science laboratory. This will often screen out the individuals who are not suited for the rigorous life of a surgical scientist. “I was most fortunate at the end of my surgical training at the Cornell-New York Hospital Medical Center to have the opportunity to spend two years at the Cardiovascular Research Institute in California with Richard Durbin PhD, one of the few people that had an inkling of how water moved through biological membranes in 1963. This was a treat, since Julie Comroe had attracted a large cadre of outstanding scientists, and I greatly admired the way they went about their work. Dr. Comroe use to chide me a bit by implying that surgeons were just dumb plumbers. I did not take offense, since he was partly right. I subsequently went on to work at the University of Alabama where I had close contact with Rehm, Hirschowitz, Sachs and others. It was here that I learned how to manage my time while carrying out a busy surgical practice and a heavy teaching load. By the time I moved to Utah to assume the Chair of Surgery at Utah, I was prepared to properly mentor furture surgeon/scientists some 15 years after I graduated from Medical School. I use this time frame to inform my students that it takes time to become an educated plumber. There are many rewards along the way, and some unique ones for those that live long enough. For example, I recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of University Surgeons in recognition of the number of outstanding surgical leaders that I helped to get started on their careers. Like Mentor, ‘I bask in their success.’ If you wish, I can stretch my memory, and put more thoughts and experiences down on paper. Again, many thanks for the birthday greeting.” Yih-Loong Lai writes: “I retired from the Department of Physiology, National Taiwan University, at the end of July, 2003. Right after my retirement, I worked part-time at MDS Pharma Services in Taipei, as a consultant. At the end of February of 2008, I stepped down the consulting job. Then, I became one of the “completely retired” people. I like to travel, and thus I joined tour groups to visit Australia in March and then to New Zealand in April of this year. Last year, I toured several places of Taiwan, including Peng-hu (islands), Orchid Island, Syue Mountain (the second highest mountain in Taiwan, the picture shown below) and Kinmen. Also, last September, I made sightseeing in Kweilin, China. In addition to my consulting job and traveling, I have worked on physiological textbooks. We have groups of scholars, including my previous colleagues and students, to make translation (from English to Chinese) of two physiology textbooks. One is Vander’s brief edition (Human Physiology – The Mechanisms of Body Function) and another one is by Ganong (Review of Medical Physiology). We finished the first one about two years ago and the second one is getting close to be printed. Also, Li-Ling Wu (my previous student) added Chinese guidance (key summaries and explanations of phrases) on Vander’s Human Physiology and I checked it over before its publication early this year.” Letter to Beverly Bishop Mario Vassalle writes: “Thank you kindly for your wishes and those of the American Physiological Society for my 80th birthday. “After my last two NIH grant applications did not succeed on being funded, I decided to retire as a Professor of Physiology and Pharmacology on July 1 2006. At that date, I was appointed Emeritus Professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at this same institution and I was given office space to finish up my scientific work. “I am generally at work during weekdays (to the disbelief of some), with the exception of a few months in 2007 when I was a Visiting Professor at the University of Parma Medical School, Parma, Italy. I was involved in the study of stem cells with whole cell patch clamp and for the treatment of myocardial infarct in an animal model. “Here in New York, I have to write up experimental data collected in the past on a few topics. A paper on a slowly inactivating plateau sodium current has appeared in 2008 in Experimental Physiology. I labeled it INa2 to distinguish it from another slowly inactivating sodium current (INa3) that we reported in 2003 in the Journal of Physiology and that seems to be important for the pacemaker activity of Purkinje fibers. “Right now, I am engaged in writing a manuscript on the autonomic control of the sino-atrial node, whose experiments were carried out in vitro and seem to offer what I consider some rather interesting findings. In the meanwhile, a memoir that Dr. K. Koizumi and I wrote about Dr. C. McC. Brooks (who was one of my teachers) has appeared in print a couple of weeks ago by the National Academy of Sciences. “I do continue to write (in Italian and English versions) aphorisms, philosophical essays and (now occasionally) a poem. I consider those activities as the expression of different facets of my identity and certainly not ‘hobbies.’ I usually pursue those interests during the weekend when my family is still peacefully resting, although I dwell with these matters now and then at any time. “I myself have managed to publish two books with 1000 aphorisms each and four books of poems in the USA. Two of those books have been published in the Italian version by publishers in Italy. In that country, I also published another book of aphorisms and another of poems in the Italian version (the latter has just appeared by Maremmi Publisher in Florence). I am very keen about publishing the last two books also in America, but there is so much I can do each day. “Right now, I am polishing my fourth book of aphorisms (Sea Shells) and I am writing an essay entitled, Synthesis with the subtitle of ‘An outline of human nature.’ “As for my ‘words of wisdom for younger colleagues, I know that experience cannot be transmitted, not only because each of us is different, but because the environment that we live in changes all the time. Nevertheless, I will offer some of my reflections. “When I started my research activity in the USA in 1959, electrophysiology of the heart was a relative young branch of science. It was already a departure from the study of whole organ, but an advantage of a new technique is that it is bound to produce plenty of new results. At that that time, we had animal laboratories for the students in which they saw physiology in action. I thought the animal laboratory was a major strength of the American educational system. In fact, it was in one of those labs that I started developing the concept that ventricular standstill by the vagus nerve is due to the unmasking of the overdrive suppression that the sinus node exerts on the automaticity of Purkinje fibers. That kind of physiology has an obvious relation to the physiology of the body. “Since then, molecular biology has made great strides. This highly positive development brings about knowledge that does have an immediate importance also for clinical medicine. But in every endeavor there are some drawbacks. In this case, researchers tend to get deep in very narrow areas. Sometimes a great competence in a given topic is at the expense of grasping the general picture. This in itself matters little (specialized knowledge is a must nowadays), except when it comes to teaching the future generations of physicians. Sometimes, the teaching of organ physiology to medical student may be viewed as something foreign to one’s interest and (what is worse) to one’s intimate knowledge of what one is asked to teach outside one’s field of specialization. “Since the advantages of the molecular biology approach are overwhelming, the sensible thing is to try to increase the training of future teachers. For that reason, I would think that graduate students should obligatorily take (and pass) the courses in basic sciences taken by the medical students. This is probably done in several places, but perhaps not in all of them. It might be correctly objected that this cannot be worse than CBLs, where students are supposed to teach each other. “Another point that troubles me for its possible dire consequences is the fact that the financial support of scientific research by institutions like NIH has gradually shifted to include the support of Universities (overhead) and researchers (in the form of salaries and fringe benefits). This means that the cost of carrying out a scientific project has increased greatly, with the consequence that fewer grant applications can be funded. This is a serious threat not only to younger investigators (lack of grant support for a few years would be professionally fatal) but to the very future of science since it would discourage research careers. I know very well that the Universities need all the financial support that they can get, but not at the expense of their very function. The point that I raise is bound not to be very welcome, but I guess that the problems that we do not like to consider do not disappear for that reason. “Of course, I realize that more scientific progress has been accomplished in the last 60 years or so than during the rest of the history of humanity. I consider myself fortunate to have been and being a part of these extraordinary times. Nay, I am proud of it.” Letter to Vernon Bishop Allen Silbergleit writes: “It’s hard to believe that I am indeed 80 years old, at least chronologically. I am most thankful to my ancestors and their genes for allowing me, at least to date, to be somewhat younger physiologically. Gradua-tion from medical school is well over 50 years in the past while residency training in general and cardiothoracic surgery, graduate school and the doctorate in physiology is approaching 50 years. Marriage to my teenage bride, and still lovely, is also more than 50 years in the past. It’s also hard to believe that I have been a member of the faculty at the Wayne State University School of Medicine (WSUSOM) and affiliated hospitals since 1962, with joint appointments in the Departments of Physiology and Surgery since the beginning. “I have not yet retired! Although relatively few of my vintage are still fully active professionally, I am neither the oldest in age nor the longest serving faculty member at the WSUSOM. I consider my 46 years of service in one institution to be indicative of perseverance and dedication but my grown up doctor sons consider it to be a lack of ambition! My spouse of many virtues does tend to be slight hypercritical of those she loves and occasionally asks: ‘What are you trying to prove?’ “My efforts in physiology and surgery have not been separate careers but interdigitate for the most part. I have always been a great advocate of the basic science underpinnings of clinical medicine and this was one reason for my co-founding the Southeast Michigan Center for Medical Education (SEMCME), 35 years ago, now the largest community based medical education consortium in the United States. One of my fears, especially in the early years, was that the surgeons would consider me a physiologist and the physiologists would consider me a surgeon! This did not materialize and I have been accepted as both, by both. Additionally, I am neither the only surgeon-physiologist at WSUSOM nor the first. Dr. Charles Johnson, who was Professor and Chairman of the Department of Surgery at WSUSOM until his untimely death in 1960, founded the Detroit Physiological Society in 1937 and the Detroit Surgical Association in 1947. “Perhaps closest to my heart have been the many medical students, graduate students and residents it has been my pleasure to teach. There is a special niche for the subset of students who have received the combined MD-PhD degree. My proudest accomplishment, and still operational, is my participation in the guiding of students and residents who have surpassed my colleagues and me in ability and/or widespread recognition. That’s the way it should be. Our students should be better than we are in order to advance civilization. “Since I consider teaching to be the noblest of professions, I was most please to receive the Parker J. Palmer Courage to Teach Award from The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) last year, one of 10 in the nation. Parker Palmer Awardees are asked to contribute some words of wisdom or inspiration to the ACGME Annual Report and for the 2007 Report published in December 2007, the centerfold prints my contribution, highlighting one sentence I phrased as the creed of the teacher: ‘What could be more important that the advancement of civilization by the young men and women we imbue with the spirit of humanism and inquiry?’ “Many of my long-term efforts have been at S. Joseph Mercy Oakland (SJMO), a midsize to large teaching hospital affiliated with WSUSOM, which does not own a university hospital. Of the several hats I have worn, only one is emeritus, and that is Program Director of Surgery at SJMO. I am still Chairman of the Division of Surgery. During my surgery heyday, I operated on a great many patients, including some of the famous and infamous in Michigan and beyond and on a number of my faculty colleagues and family of faculty colleagues. In this era of transparency and disclosure, I have to note that some of my work continues on the dark side including administrative functions at the hospital and the Dean’s Council at the medical school. On the bright side, I have been the official host to various Nobelists who visit Michigan. “On the academic side, I continue to publish in eclectic fashion. Numbers are respectable but have never been particularly prolific. Since we hear what we like to believe, the quality and significance of a number of our papers are quite decent, and in some areas, much more than decent! I was on the full cover of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) ten years out of medical school for my work in mycotic aneurysms. My doctor sons note that it’s all been downhill after that! Hah, hah, they’ve inherited my wry genes. I like to believe my colleagues when they note that I have probably sponsored more award-winning student and resident research than anyone in Michigan, ever. The most recent award-winning presentation was on April 9, 2008. Much of my work has been of the bench to bedside type, now popularized as a form of ‘translational research,’ although some other papers are purely basic science and some are purely clinical. I must admit that I am not above a sense of satisfaction when I see some of our work referenced in peer review journals and in medical textbooks. Another interest, lifelong, has been in history and ranges from American history in high school to medical history for many decades. You don’t have to be old to be a historian but it helps. “It doesn’t seem so long ago that I had a hard time accepting that I was over 40 years old! I do get reminders. My number one son recently told me, ‘Dad, I hate to tell you that you have a 50-year-old son.’ Soon after, one of the best-known heart surgeons in Michigan told me, in similar fashion, ‘I hate to tell you that you have a 75-year-old (surgical) resident.’ “I am everlastingly thankful to my great family: my wonderful wife, Ina, who raised great kids while I was busy doing what busy doctors do, my children, male and female, and my grandchildren, male and female. Both sons went to medical school at the University of Michigan rather than my home base at WSUSOM, causing a few of my deans to twit me just a tad. One son, Richard, is a neuroradiologist at Beaumont Hospital here in metro Detroit and the younger, Robert, is a tenured professor at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor. Both are more capable than me, and as I said before, that’s great—that’s as it should be.” |
|
|