Dr. Laurie H. Glimcher, the Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean of Weill Cornell Medical College, gave the following address to the Weill Cornell Medical College Class of 2015 during commencement on May 28 at Carnegie Hall.
Thank you, President Skorton, and good afternoon.
I'm thrilled to welcome the class of 2015 and their families and friends to Commencement. Many of you have travelled a long way to be here, including our new doctors who made the 14-hour flight all the way from Qatar. Many, many congratulations to all of our graduates on reaching this incredible milestone in your lives.
I'd also like to thank our outstanding faculty members at Weill Cornell who have taught, mentored, and trained our newest batch of physicians, scientists, and health professionals. The brightest, most accomplished students come to Weill Cornell to learn. And thanks to our faculty, we know that by the time you graduate, you’re equipped with the skills and experience necessary to become real leaders in your field. I'd also like to acknowledge our staff, who worked so hard to make this such a lovely celebration.
And to our graduates: I think I have a pretty good sense of how you might be feeling right now. I'm the daughter of a physician-scientist, as well as a physician-scientist myself. I watched my son graduate from medical school and will be seeing him graduate from his surgical residency program next month. As a trained rheumatologist, I guess I could say that medicine and science are in my bones.
If I could put myself in your place, I would imagine that you're thinking about the future with a lot of excitement and anticipation. There are probably exciting summer plans to look forward to, an upcoming residency or postdoc position, maybe a new job. You’re taking a huge step right now, so I’m sure there’s also some nervousness and uncertainty hovering in the background.
Maybe your thoughts are venturing back into the past. You might be remembering when you first wanted to become a doctor, or a scientist, or a person who works to make our health care system better. Maybe today marks the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. Perhaps there were obstacles to overcome and people who helped you along the way.
It's at moments of transition and great significance, like today, that we can see the trajectories of our lives most clearly. And when we think about where we came from and where we’re going, we do so by thinking of our lives as a story. Paul Ricoeur, a French philosopher, understood this when he wrote that life is "an activity and a passion in search of a narrative." The stories of our lives have a beginning, a middle, and an end, filled with people, places, events, and hopefully, purpose.
For those of us who are clinicians, we need to remember that patients understand their lives as stories too. And often, when they come to the hospital or the clinic, their stories have been interrupted, unexpectedly, by injury or disease. That's when their stories most need to be told, and most importantly, listened to.
It's an exhilarating time to be practicing medicine right now. We're on the cusp of being able to offer patients truly individualized treatments based on their genetic makeup. New diagnostics and innovative therapies are being developed every day, and we are making remarkable progress in battling some of the most challenging diseases of our time.
With all the tools and technologies at our disposal, it's essential that we remember that what our patients need most of all is to be heard. On a day-to-day level, that means taking the time to listen to their stories — even though you might have paperwork piling up on your desk or a machine that can accurately visualize bodily tissues.
Make the effort to really listen. Remember what made you want to practice medicine in the first place. Your own story is evolving along with that of your patients. At the same time that you work to develop your clinical skills, remember to do so with humanity and compassion and patience.
Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital, recently wrote a book, called Being Mortal, about the limits of modern medicine. One passage in particular struck me. In it, he writes:
"Sometimes we can offer a cure, sometimes only a salve, sometimes not even that. But whatever we can offer, our interventions, and the risks and sacrifices they entail, are justified only if they serve the larger aims of a person's life…When we remember [that,] the good we can do is breathtaking."
Listening to the stories our patients tell helps us to become better doctors and leaders. It can give us clues into the kinds of treatment that someone may want or is willing to accept. It can help us understand what health and illness mean to different people. And it forces us to acknowledge that despite our professional competence, uncertainty and complexity lie at the heart of everyone's life.
Stories are also important for the scientists among us. Behind some of the greatest discoveries in medical science are compelling stories, often with many twists and turns, detours and delays. That's how scientific research works in real life.
Let me give you an example. One of my favorite stories of discovery is about a scientist named Barney Rosenberg, who was trained as a physicist. He wasn’t working on any problem related to human disease, but because of his curiosity, he may have saved the lives of more cancer patients than most of the cancer researchers in the world combined.
The story starts in 1964. Barney Rosenberg wanted to see what would happen if bacteria were placed in a strong electric field. He put some E. coli cells in a dish with two platinum electrodes and turned on the current. To his surprise, the bacteria cells stopped dividing. In addition, they grew from small rods into long filaments, up to 300 times their normal length. Rosenberg happened to know that E. coli exhibits this kind of behavior only under certain conditions, including when it's exposed to anti-tumor drugs.
He then figured out that a particular substance was being generated electrochemically from the electrodes and the buffer solution in his experiment. That substance was cisplatin, a compound first described in 1848 and thought to be poisonous. But knowing that cisplatin was causing bacteria to behave in the same way that some anti-tumor drugs do, Rosenberg wondered whether cisplatin could have anti-cancer properties of its own.
He needed help to test his hypothesis because he had never done that kind of experimental work before. He teamed up with colleagues in other departments in order to administer cisplatin in mice, and eventually in humans. By 1973, it was clear that the drug was helping patients with testicular and ovarian cancers, two diseases that were notoriously difficult to treat at the time. As doctors learned how to manage its side effects, cisplatin went on to become one of the top-selling cancer drugs in the world. It's still widely used today to treat multiple types of cancer.
Breakthroughs often emerge through a combination of serendipity, persistence, daring, and collaboration. The discovery of cisplatin came completely from left field, from a physicist curious about bacteria and electricity. Yet it ended up transforming the way we treat cancer. As this story shows, sometimes an initial, seemingly random question or observation can set a whole chain of events in motion. Following a scientific story to its end can take us down an unpredictable path, but in the best cases, that path ultimately leads back to the patient.
Cornell University is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. One of its most celebrated professors was the astronomer Carl Sagan, who taught and did research at Cornell for 28 years. A quote attributed to him captures the sense of possibility and optimism that I hope to leave you with today. In his words, "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
Regardless of whether we're a clinician, a scientist, a health professional, a patient, or something else, we're all engaged in writing the stories of our lives. And ultimately, these are stories of discovery—stories of scientific breakthroughs, stories of courage in the face of adversity, stories about ourselves and the kind of people we want to be.
The one message I hope you take with you from your time at Weill Cornell is to keep the patient at the center of everything you do. Make that the driving force in your story.
Congratulations again to the class of 2015. We are so proud of your accomplishments and wish you every success in the future.
Thank you.