Professor Tomonaga as I Saw Him

George Rosen as I knew him.

T was a gray Baltimore morning in April 1942 when I first met George Rosen in the Johns Hopkins Institute. We 'clicked' immediately. Being both devotees of medical history we talked for hours almost exclusively about our adored subject; strangely enough neither about our careers (as it behooves colleagues) nor about world politics, though at that moment it breathed heavily down all our necks. I...

I went; I saw: I was never the same!

Oswald Avery: the professor, DNA, and the Nobel Prize that eluded him.

In 1944, two Canadians, Oswald Avery and Colin MacLeod, and an American, MacLyn McCarty, published a paper in The Journal of Experimental Medicine that demonstrated genes to be the chemical, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Even though this paper is now regarded as the single mos important publication in biology of the 20th century, Avery was not awarded the Nobel Prize. This raises the question as...

The Best Thing I Saw at ASCO

The 2017 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting was a practice-changing event sure to excite even the most dispassionate among us. In my own field of gastrointestinal oncology, there were seismic alterations in the way many will now approach adjuvant therapy in colorectal and biliary tract cancers. And as we enter the brave newworld of histology agnosticism, even Kuhn would...

The most memorable patient I never saw.

Soon after midnight, after a busy day on the inpatient psych unit, I slipped into a deep sleep. Then the phone rang in the residents’ on-call room. “Dr. Lazarus?” the voice on the other end inquired. “Yes,” I replied, half asleep. “This is Dr. Hendricks (not her real name) in the ER. Are you the on-call psych resident tonight?” “I am,” I answered drowsily. Every physician knows that nightly awa...