200 Years of YSM

I wrote this piece for a bicentennial publication about listening to this symposium we had on Thursday/Friday of last week. It was called "Biomedicine of a New Century" and featured many Nobel Prize winners. Because they will probably alter my voice in it to make it more suitable for peer reviewed publication, here is my original:
It's August 19^th 2010. After years of struggling through challenging science courses, spending hours volunteering in the community, and shadowing medical professionals, I was finally becoming a doctor, at least symbolically. They called my name and I crossed the stage to shake hands with the dean and receive my white coat. I could see my parents smiling and my classmates applauding and I began to feel a strong sense of pride and accomplishment. I was officially a medical student, a doctor in training, and a member of the Yale School of Medicine Class of 2014.

Yet, immediately upon wearing the coat I noticed something on the side of it, a patch, symbolizing the bicentennial year of Yale Medicine. As if the pressure of having someone automatically think I know what I am talking about, simply because I have on this symbolic piece of clothing that announces to anyone, “I am a doctor", was not enough, with my walk across the stage, I became a member of this symbolic class. I somehow now represented the future of 200 years of rich history and it was only my first day on campus.

Throughout the year, casual celebrations of the bicentennial reminded us that we were still celebrating. Walking around the hospital with my white coat and patch, while I learned to take a history or perform a physical was daunting. I was incredibly wet behind the ears, but to anyone who I met, I was a first year, and I was the future of Yale Medicine. While it is true that I would be thought of as such at any institution, or in any year here, there was something different about being the 200^th.

It wasn’t until the Bicentennial Symposium on April 28, 2011 that I really understood what it was to be a member of Yale Med ‘s, and science itself’s, future. Sure, when I was in Physiology conference and we were discussing a patient case and someone at Yale had invented the treatment, or if we were in cell biology and a pathway we were learning was discovered by our professor, I took notice of what a rich history of discovery in science and medicine there is at Yale. However, as it is hard to tell how much is pride when it is coming from within these same ivy halls, it is eye opening to hear scholars from other institutions, Nobel laureates and Knights among them, talk about Yale Medicine.

I took my seat in a crowded auditorium and anxiously awaited Dr. Eric Kandel’s speech. After an introduction by Dean Alpern, the dean of our medical school, a very enthusiastic and humble man took the stage. He broke the ice by thanking the crowd for their generous applause and thanked Yale for offering to let him speak. He then said of this warm recognition that “[his] father would have enjoyed it, and [his] mother would’ve believed it.” With that, the aura of him being such a distinguished scientist and Nobel Prize winner was broken with a wave of laughter and a sense of excitement for what was to come.

Instead of starting his talk entitled “On the Persistence of Memory Storage”, Kandel did something no one would have expected him to do, he started talking about the history of Yale Medicine, in particular the fact that Yale Med was the first medical school to give a degree to “a person who had never attended the school”. Among roars of laughter from the wide-eyed Yale students and faculty in the audience, he told the story of Daniel Turner, a Londoner who asked for a medical degree in exchange for the donation of books to a library at Yale. Turner wrote, “If Your Lordships judge me worthy of the Degree of Doctor of the Yale Academy, and care to transmit to me a Diploma, I shall accept it not only as a token of Your Gratitude, but shall consider it an honor as great as if it had been conferred by another, even more renowned University.” While the audience was in disbelief that this could have even been written, and smiles were exchanged about Turner’s opinion of Yale’s degree versus one at a different University,  Yale did agree to this exchange and gave this man a degree. Of this historical fact, Dr. Kandel joked that exchanging recognition for books has helped Yale School of Medicine acquire one of the best historical libraries in the world. Referencing Yale’s history with Harvey Cushing and the Cushing collection, the audience knew that the library was a unique feature of our history and with a great sense of pride in the school felt throughout the audience, even if some of the books were garnered in a way that could never have occurred today, Dr. Kandel proceeded to talk about his expertise, memory.

Looking at his past work and also to his future, Dr. Kandel described in detail the biology behind his memory storage experiments in aplysia, a giant marine snail, and his unpublished works furthering these studies in other animal models. While his brilliance shone through his eloquent descriptions and novel approaches to long-term memory creation, what struck me most was that he credited each and every researcher in his lab for their projects and their work. He did not say “we” when an experiment was carried out in his lab under his supervision, but instead said “him or her”, acknowledging each person’s efforts individually. To me, this is the future of medicine. Sure, his work is astounding and his thought process unmatched, but his mentoring, and his willingness to continue to support the future of medicine in the people was inspirational. As my MD-PhD in Neuroscience friend rushed the stage after his speech to have him sign her copy of his famous Neuroscience textbook, what he wrote to her says it all. The inscription read, “I hope that you like Neuroscience as much as I do”, and with that, the neuroscience “pope” signed the Neuroscience “bible”, and inspired another future neuroscientist to be great.

Sitting in the audience listening attentively to his every word, and seeing my friend’s excitement following her interaction, I finally realized what it meant to be a member of the bicentennial class and to be a student at such a remarkable institution. I did not feel a weight, but instead a goal, an aspiration, and an excitement for the future. At Yale, not only will Nobel Prize winners like Dr. Kandel come to speak, but they will also spend some of their lecture talking about this school and the history behind it, as it is truly remarkable. At Yale, not only will a famous scientist talk about his past work and future endeavors, but he will also credit and look to his students to mentor and really be the future of medicine.

As someone who read his novel “In Search of Memory” and intended to quote it in my medical school admissions essay for its’ eloquent descriptions of life in academic medicine and research, listening to this talk was really coming full circle. I am no longer an applicant, I am a medical student, and his talk helped me to envision my own space in the future of medicine and of this institution. I feel honored to be at Yale, and even more proud to wear a white coat.