For Scott Runyon, attending Weill Cornell Medical College was a decision etched in the lines of a black and white photograph.
The young man in the photograph, poised and dapper, graduated from the same medical school nearly 50 years ago. He moved to Boston, started a family, and became a renowned orthopedic surgeon whose practice of medicine went far beyond simple diagnoses and treatments.
Runyon loves this photograph and finds inspiration in it. The image is of his father, Dr. Robert Chase Runyon, who instilled in him a commitment to compassionate patient care.
"If there was an institution that gave him the sense of altruism and integrity that he had his whole life," said Runyon, a first-year student in the Class of 2017, "that's where I wanted to be."
Runyon's deep, abiding love for his father inspired a life's calling.
The youngest of four children, Runyon grew up in Boston, a few blocks away from Fenway Park, before moving to Concord, Mass. Runyon was raised on sports and the Red Sox, time with family and church on Sundays. And then he'd talk to his father. He was an older dad, but they got along very well.
"He would tell me about the cases he had when he got home in the evenings," Runyon said. "He was really the best there was. I just remember his demeanor when he treated his patients. He was a symbol of expertise."
But as much as Runyon had looked up to his father, he wasn't yet convinced that a life in medicine was in the cards for him. He enjoyed research and science, but as a teenager he thought of himself more as an engineer than a doctor. He went to Stanford University with a plan to major in mechanical engineering, but was only a few months into his freshman year when he began to question his path. Instead of taking the traditional four-year college route, he decided to take a leave of absence from Stanford and complete a two-year religious Mormon mission sharing the Gospel in France.
"It ended up being the most trying and happiest time of my life," said Runyon, who during his time in France also helped people with addiction, worked with immigrants and refugees, and taught English. "For the first time, it exposed me to things that were pretty hard that I had never faced. It was a really important, formative step for me." He thanks his father and his mother Lucia for their kindness and support all along the way.
While his mission opened his eyes to human struggles, Runyon's own challenge came when he returned from Europe. His dad started to forget things and became paranoid, and was in need of the same compassionate care he had provided to decades of patients. Diagnosed with vascular dementia, a condition characterized by brain damage from impaired flow to the brain and exacerbated by a history of heart disease, the elder Runyon quickly succumbed to his illness.
"This was a man who was in control his whole life," Runyon said. "He was the one who called the shots. And for three years I saw him lose that. I went from not being interested in medicine to wanting, at all costs, to preserve him and take care of him. More than that, I wanted to see what he did and how he took care of people and understand him more fully."
Runyon's experience opened his eyes to the health implications of aging for an increasingly older population. Experts estimate that there are 5 million Americans with Alzheimer's disease, a figure that will only rise as the baby boomer generation reaches its twilight years. Age-related diseases affect not just patients, but also their caregivers and loved ones.
Runyon returned to Stanford, combining his new-found passion for medicine and his interest in engineering in a bioengineering degree. He started investigating how various immune cell types respond to allergens and toxins, work that was ultimately published in PLOS ONE. During his summers in Boston he worked with Dr. Sekar Kathiresan at Massachusetts General Hospital and studied a protein associated with heart attack risk.
At 5 a.m. one morning during his senior year, Runyon got a call from his mother. He knew. His father had just died.
He graduated a few months later from Stanford in 2012 and finished a master's program in pharmacology at Cambridge University in England this spring.
Now he's learning medicine in the same classrooms, researching in the same labs, roaming the same hallways as Dr. Robert Chase Runyon did some 50 years ago.
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