‘Do some good in the world,’ dean exhorts Class of 1998

As the 106 members of the Class of 1998 received their medical degrees in May, Dean David A. Kessler, M.D., urged them to think back to the altruism that guided and propelled them as they made the decision to become doctors. “You wanted to do some good in the world,” he said, “and you were able to say those words flat out, without any embarrassment or hesitation.”

The 1998 Commencement was Dr. Kessler’s first at Yale and the first in recent memory to be conducted in pouring rain, which drove graduates and their families under a tent on Harkness Lawn. After ceremonies on the main campus, graduates followed bagpiper Glenn Pryor as he led the class along College Street to the medical school Commencement under the tent.

“This is a teacher’s dream,” said Dr. Kessler, “a last chance to exhort, challenge and inspire.” His own exhortation was that students remain true to the idealism that comes with being a healer. “You are a healer when you understand that the amount of health you can actually promote is relatively small when weighed on the scale of human mortality,” he said. “You are a healer when you throw away that scale and fight for every inch of health, against the odds, as if immortality were embedded in your fingertips. And you are a healer if you know when it’s time to quit.”

In closing, Dr. Kessler offered the graduates warm wishes for the future. “I wish you mornings of great promise,” he said, “evenings of pleasant weariness and nights filled with the sleep that comes to those who have done their best. … The most fortunate among you will be able to say, ‘I occupied some space on Earth and
I did some good. I was a healer.’ ”

Before the presentation of diplomas, students and faculty received awards for work of distinction in research, education and clinical care.

Student awards

Parker Prize: Hahnah J. Kasowski

The Miriam Kathleen Dasey Award: Michelle A. Barton

The Norma Bailey Berniker Prize: Matthew H.T. Bui

The Dean’s Prize for Community Service: Heather J. Lynch

NBI Healthcare Foundation Humanism in Medicine Student Award: Lynda S. Kauls

The Campbell Prize: Russel C. Huang

The Perkins Prize: Russel C. Huang

Merck Book Awards: Lynda S. Kauls and Ellen A. Komisaruk

Lange Book Award: James F. Borin

M.D./Ph.D. Award: Matthew H.T. Bui and Charles C. Hong

Connecticut Society of American Board of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Prize: Ellen A. Komisaruk

New England Pediatric Society Prize: Daniel T. Coghlin

The Society for Academic Emergency Medicine Award: Kevin P. Daly

Connecticut Society of American Board Surgeons Prize: Hahnah J. Kasowski

Peter A.T. Grannum Award: Sydney C. Butts, Merle A. Carter and Olivia I. Okereke

Lauren Weinstein Award: Joanne M. Quinones

The Winternitz Prize in Pathology: John Tilton

Endocrine Society Medical Student Achievement Award: Christi M. Cavaliere

William U. Gardner Thesis Prize: Alan Cheng

Louis G. Welt Prize: Jeffrey T. Reynolds

American Cancer Society Prize: John P. Forman

Peter F. Curran Prize: Nirit Weiss

M.D./Ph.D. Thesis Prize: Nicole Ullrich

Association for Academic Surgery Research Award: David J. Chang

The Dr. Louis H. Nahum Prize: Helen M. Chun

The Harold H. Lamport Biomedical Research Prize: Robert M. Kalus

The Ferris Prize: Kent Kwasind Huston

The International Health Prize: Kent Kang Hu

The Nicholas J. Giarman Prize: James D. O’Holleran

Transfusion Medicine/Laboratory Medicine Award: Tobias T.P. Lee

Vernon W. Lippard Prize: Samir S. Shah

The John P. Peters Prize: Katherine B. Auerswald

The Keese Prize: Naomi S. Donnelley

Faculty awards

Bohmfalk Prizes: Stuart D. Flynn, M.D., associate professor of pathology, and Richard J. Gusberg, M.D., professor of surgery

NBI Humanism in Medicine Faculty Award: Jack Van Hoff, M.D., associate professor of pediatrics

Dean’s Medical Education Farr Prize: Ervin E. Jones, M.D., associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology

The Leah M. Lowenstein Award: Ronnie A. Rosenthal, M.D., associate professor of surgery

The Francis Gilman Blake Award: Richard Belitsky, M.D., assistant clinical professor of psychiatry

The Betsy Winters House Staff Award: Anju Nohria, M.D., instructor in medicine

Health is a global affair,
EPH graduates are told at Commencement

People entering the field of public health face issues that are becoming more complex by the day, journalist Laurie Garrett told graduating students at the EPH Commencement Day in May. “Your work will by necessity be global. It will probably have to be executed with fewer resources than you have today.”

Ms. Garrett, a medical writer for Newsday and author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism for her coverage of the Ebola virus outbreak in Africa. She began her Commencement remarks by citing the optimism that reigned in public health 20 years ago. There was hope, she said, that many diseases would be eradicated, changing the role of public health workers. “For the last 20 years at least one aspect of that scenario has become true,” she said. “It is the loss of the traditional role of public health. Government no longer wishes to pay for it.”

And in that time, she said, health problems have become more complicated as the population ages, HIV continues to spread and illness travels with ease across the globe, which is fast becoming “one massive, human petri dish.” Public health workers will also find themselves dealing with people whose native languages are spoken by only a few thousand people in remote pockets of the Third World. “How do you say ‘push’ to a woman in labor who just came to San Diego from a small village in Guatemala?” she asked. “Spanish won’t do. No matter how many languages you speak, it isn’t enough.”

Graduates cheered and applauded when she criticized the federal government’s refusal to fund needle exchange programs. Students taped syringes to their mortarboards in a gesture of support for the programs.

As they advance in their careers, she said, graduates will absorb foreign languages and cultures, learn how government works, teach people about public health and learn to survive “monsoons” like the one that blew in during Commencement. Graduates, friends and families gathered under a tent on the lawn for the ceremony.

Echoing Ms. Garrett’s thoughts, Dean Michael H. Merson, M.D., said, “This is a time when challenges to our profession have never been so many and the needs so great.”

In her class address, student speaker Andrea Kim stressed what she considered to be the unique quality of the class. “There is a feeling of camraderie and respect among all of us,” she said as she urged her classmates to abandon “comfort zones” and try get to know others. “Sometimes we completely miss the opportunity to get to know someone because of the walls we build around us. Public health is a field where relating to people is essential.”

Some graduates are continuing their education and plan to obtain M.D. or Ph.D. degrees. Others have obtained jobs in health care management consulting firms, managed care firms or organizations such as the Inter-American Development Bank and Centers for Disease Control.

In addition to 107 M.P.H. graduates, two students received doctor of public health degrees and 10 students received Ph.D.s. The graduates honored Elizabeth Claus, Ph.D., M.D., with the award for excellence in teaching.

Nobelist returns to New Haven
for Student Research Day

Growing up in New Haven as the son of a Yale pharmacologist, Alfred G. Gilman, M.D., Ph.D., recalls feeling at home in the laboratory from an early age. “My father was spectacularly good at showing me the joy of science,” said Dr. Gilman, who also pursued a career in pharmacology and in 1994 won the Nobel Prize for his research into G proteins. He discussed research into the proteins, his own and that of other scientists, during the 11th Annual Lee E. Farr, M.D., Lecture on Student Research Day, in May.

“G proteins mediate everything from sex in yeast to cognition in humans,” said Dr. Gilman, the Raymond and Ellen Willie Distinguished Chair in Molecular Neuro-pharmacology, Regental Professor and Chairman, Department of Pharmacology at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. The proteins have been likened to a switchboard operator who receives messages and makes sure they reach the proper recipient. Failure in that task can cause disease. Researchers have linked malfunctioning G proteins to alcoholism, diabetes, cancerous tumors and cholera. Dr. Gilman and Martin Rodbell, Ph.D., a scientist emeritus at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina, shared the Nobel Prize for identifying G proteins and their role in the signaling process.

John N. Forrest Jr., M.D., director of the Office of Student Research, said the day “celebrates 159 years of a tradition unique in American medicine.” Yale requires medical students to write a thesis on a research project in order to graduate. “The value of the thesis,” Dr. Forrest said, “is not the concept of trying for a scientific career, but to teach that all physicians are scientists.”

“This is the day that a lot of us look forward to,” said Dean David A. Kessler, M.D., “because it really defines us as a school.”

“Being in a laboratory situation and working with a leading scientist in the field of interest is really a critical part of my medical education,” said Jeffrey Reynolds, one of five students who won awards for their theses. “I feel that, having done this project, I have access intellectually to most of the things I can read in the literature. Without it, I wouldn’t really be able to look critically at the literature.”

“It changes your perspective when you’re in a clinical situation to have that research perspective,” said Nicole Ullrich, another award-winning student.

This year students prepared 63 posters showing the results of their studies. Five students made oral presentations of their award-winning theses. They were: Dr. Reynolds, Phenotypic Expression of Glucorticoid-Remediable Aldosteronism in a Large Kindred (Internal Medicine); Alan Cheng, JAK3 and the Pathogenesis of Severe Combined Immunodeficiency: Insights into Structure and Function (Immunobiology); John Forman, Recombinant Vesicular Stomatitis Viruses Expressing HIV-1 Gag and Env Genes Generate HIV-Like Particles and Elicit Anti-HIV Immune Responses in Mice (Pathology); Nirit Weiss, Carotid Body Chemoreceptors: Mechanisms of Neurotransmitter Release (Pediatrics); and Dr. Ullrich, Properties and Function of Chloride Channels in Human Glial Tumors (Neurobiology).

Student notes

A team of three Yale Physician Associate students took first prize in the medical challenge bowl playoffs held in March at the annual American Academy of Physician Assistants (AAPA) Northeast Regional Meeting on the campus of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. The meeting was sponsored by the New Jersey State Society of Physician Assistants and the Northeast Consortium of PA Programs. Teams from 14 regional PA programs competed. The Yale program was represented by first-year students Tony Barrett, Broheen Elias and Debra Strigun and by a second-year team composed of Aviva Asnis, Grace Barresi and Joe Castro, who were last year’s champions. The Barrett-Elias-Strigun team took first place against a team from Rutgers University and moved onto the annual Student Academy of the AAPA/Searle National Medical Challenge Bowl in Salt Lake City, where they reached the semi-finals May 24.

Shannon Turley was presented the 1998 Richard K. Gershon Pre- and Postdoctoral Fellowship Award. This award in the amount of $16,750, will support her research project Functional Pathways of Antigen Processing in Dendritic Cells. She is a graduate student in the laboratory of Ira Mellman, Ph.D., in the Department of Cell Biology.

In doctor’s black bag, decades of family history

In choosing a medical career, many budding physicians receive friendly bits of advice and the occasional keepsake from established physicians hoping to encourage them in their pursuits. When Alison Days received just such encouragement as a second-year medical student in the form of a battered old medical bag last year, she also got a piece of her own family’s past. How she came to receive the bag involved a remarkable series of coincidences.

When Ms. Days’ grandfather John Langdon, M.D., a Providence pediatrician, died more than 40 years ago, his wife gave his black medical bag bearing the initials JL to Providence ophthalmologist Frank Dimmit, M.D. In 1954, Dr. Dimmitt passed the bag on to a young family friend who then was beginning medical school at Yale. The student, Gerard N. Burrow, eventually would become dean of the School of Medicine from 1992 to 1997.

When Dr. Burrow’s daughter, Sarah, entered medical school, he handed the bag down to her. She later returned it to the Dimmitt family in Providence, entrusting the bag to her father’s childhood friend, Sterling Dimmitt, the son of Frank Dimmit.

Mr. Dimmit, not a doctor himself, recalled that the granddaughter of the original JL was herself an aspiring pediatrician. He decided that Alison Days should have the bag. So, the historic, much traveled medical bag returned to its original family and Ms. Days now guards the family treasure.