Convocation 2011, UMass Worcester, September 15, 2011

Convocation keynote: Keep the excitement of research and patient care alive
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee and Charles L. Sawyers lead far ranging discussion

By Kristen O’Reilly
UMass Medical School Communications

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, PhD, had an unusual message to the UMass Medical School community during the keynote address at Convocation: Do not become an expert. The author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Dr. Mukherjee said that while he learned this lesson through the process of writing, the concept is also important for keeping the excitement of research and patient care alive.

“There is something in becoming an expert . . . that really numbs our experience in science and medicine and research,” Mukherjee said. “The moment that I invoked my expertise [while writing], I completely lost the sense of wonder about medicine and about science. It was poison to the book. As I went back to reread what I had written, I could identify paragraphs where my expertise had become evident and therefore I had become numb to the idea of what was mysterious, what was moving and what was emotionally constant.”

Keeping in mind the stories of the patients who benefit from science is another way to keep the numbness away, he said, and he tells many personal stories throughout the book to bring the abstract concepts to life. This is also a critical to his other job as a physician-scientist.

“I recount the story of one patient every day to my family. It keeps me more alive,” he said. And remembering what he is working for “allows me to get over the numbness.”

“I would say the same thing,” said Charles L. Sawyers, MD, chair of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, who spoke of his work in creating Gleevec, a unique and extremely effective treatment of chronic myelogenous leukemia, for which he and two colleagues won the 2009 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award. When he brings home stories of his patients to his wife, “I don’t tell the medicine side, I tell about the social life of the patient.” And he advised students that by doing so, “when you have those frustrations, having those stories in your head, it reminds you of why you are doing it,” he said.

The wide-ranging discussion, moderated by Chancellor Michael F. Collins, was enhanced with comments and questions from the audience. The discussion touched on the importance of prevention, the danger of over regulation in suppressing investigation of unusual ideas, the most effective way to communicate complex subjects in a simple way to patients and the response to a perceived anti-science bias in the current political climate.

“Physicians and scientist are naturally a bit shy about speaking out. We have to adopt a much more aggressive, get-media type of approach,” said Sawyers, referencing Chancellor Collins’ earlier Convocation talk that called for more funding for biomedical research. “We’ve got to break out of our comfort zone of hiding out in our ivory towers and get some attention.”


Related links:

Full Chancellor’s speech
Convocation slideshow