Something Bigger Than Yourself
By
Leonard Zwelling
Today, as I write, is Friday, November 7, 2025. The BW and I are in Durham, NC at Duke for the annual Duke Medical Alumni Weekend. She has been a member of the Medical Alumni Council (MAC) for several years now and we return for the MAC meeting every six months, but the November meeting is the big one.
This is a really big one for Genie. It is the 50th anniversary of her graduation from Duke Medical School. On Saturday she will receive a medallion to commemorate the occasion. It will be bestowed upon her and her classmates by the former Chancellor of Health Affairs at Duke, Ralph Snyderman, who was Genie’s lab mentor during her third year of medical school. It was in his lab that her research career began.
Last night was the annual awards dinner where distinguished alumni and faculty are honored. This is always a special dinner hosted by Dean Mary Klotman. Genie was honored one year.
Every year we are stunned by how different the stories of the awardees are, how diverse their contributions, and their places of origin. Yet, the stories always have certain recurrent themes—dedicated parents who made profound sacrifices to gain a first-class education for their children, hours of hard work and study, and world-class mentors in equally high-level institutions. And dedication to honesty, scientific integrity, and creativity. Oh yes, one more thing. All of the recipients thanked Duke Medical School for being the unique place it is for people of all kinds to fulfill and exceed their potential. It always has been and remains a place greater than oneself.
Every year we feel the same way. We were so lucky to have spent time here at Duke. Since its inception in 1930, Duke Medical School has been world-class. It still is. The leadership of the university and the medical school over the years has been dedicated to creating a place where students and faculty alike can feel they work in a place greater than themselves. It is the way great places become great and stay great.
Genie and I also spent many years working at the National Cancer Institute’s intramural program. It is no longer a place greater than the people who work there. It once was, and we were lucky enough to have been there when it was. We left before it was no longer. There was a time when receiving excellent research and clinical training in oncology was limited to very few places. NCI was one of those places. We both benefitted from that environment.
Once the Vietnam War ended and the best of young, American academic medicine didn’t need to avoid service in Saigon by seeking it in Bethesda, NCI was no longer a unique training destination. NCI was no longer a place where people went to experience training greater than themselves. It certainly isn’t any longer.
Again, we got lucky. We moved to MD Anderson in the early years of the LeMaistre-led growth in research excellence. Genie was hired by Josh Fidler. I was hired by Irv Krakoff. We were surrounded by some of the leading lights of clinical oncology and basic research and were part of creating a place that was greater than ourselves.
Like we experienced at Duke last night, we were reminded of this every year at Anderson by the annual PRS dinner where retirees were feted and the entire faculty met to celebrate itself and the environment created by the participation of each of them in the mission of MD Anderson to eradicate cancer. In 1985, MD Anderson was a place greater than ourselves and we thrived.
Our laboratory programs flourished. Our work was federally-funded. Genie developed the first new treatment for osteosarcoma in years. I was able to juggle running my lab with attending business school at the encouragement of Dr. Krakoff and his wife Rosemary Mackey. Even before John Mendelsohn’s arrival, my administrative career had begun, one I never would have dreamed could take place, but there I was in a place greater than myself thanks to my then-boss and mentor, David Hohn.
For the next five years, things only got better. The clinical care remained first-class and Mendelsohn was improving the science. MD Anderson was still a place greater than oneself.
Then, in around 2001, things started to go in the other direction.
Two presidents of MD Anderson were on the board of Enron when it collapsed. A Houston corporate tragedy began to gnaw at its major cancer center. Dr. Mendelsohn was caught up in another scandal involving conflict of interest with a drug he developed and in which he had a huge financial stake. That drug, Erbitux, was being tested at Anderson with none of the human subjects aware of the president’s likely profiting from their participation. Enron and ImClone, the company making Mendelsohn’s drug, exemplified corporate greed. John Mendelsohn had become the parallel face of greed in academic medicine. MD Anderson went from an institution that was the hope of cancer patients to one discussed in The Wall Street Journal.
Chairman of the MD Anderson Board of Visitors, President George H. W. Bush, probably saved Mendelsohn’s job, much as Ronald Reagan lengthened Bush’s career, but the downward trend in MD Anderson excellence had begun. MD Anderson had ceased being a place greater than oneself. It had become one where you had to watch out for yourself.
There followed a ten-year period when Anderson was captured by the lawyers. It had previously been guided by the faculty. Every problem was viewed in terms of financial benefit or risk reduction and the gambler mentality that led to so many clinical cancer breakthroughs by the faculty was supplanted by caution and legal activism, often against that faculty. Lawyers cannot cure cancer.
When the next president of Anderson was chosen, the worst of the Mendelsohn Era was magnified. Ron DePinho never saw a deal from which he could not personally profit. He even had his wife profiting. MD Anderson was no longer a place greater than oneself. It had become considerably less. It took the man who had led the killing of Osama bin Laden, Admiral (and UT Chancellor) William McRaven, to unseat DePinho. It was not enough to restore MD Anderson to a place greater than oneself.
Today, under Peter Pisters, MD Anderson is a shadow of its former greatness. Where once giants of American oncology strode its hallways, now those giants hide in their offices for fear of offending someone and being accused of “unprofessionalism” and being summarily dismissed.
Last night, at Duke, we were reminded of why Duke Medical School remains a place greater than oneself. We were also reminded of the places we had stopped along the way that used to be like Duke, but no longer are.
It is likely that the NCI will never be a great place to work again. The intramural program has outlived its utility. You no longer need to go to Bethesda to get good oncology training or learn how to do research.
MD Anderson could be a place greater than oneself yet again, but not under its current leadership on Holcombe or in Austin. The academic status of the University of Texas has shrunk and will remain small as long as it is under the thumb of small men like the Governor and Lieutenant Governor.
It will take a major force of nature to recreate what R. Lee Clark and Mickey LeMaistre helped to develop before it was diminished by their successors. But, such forces of nature exist. I know where to find them. At Duke.
A long time ago, when we were in medical school, our teacher, Syd Osterhout, who was responsible for admitting the freshman medical school class told us:
“At Duke we don’t make cookies. We make cookie cutters.”
It’s still true. Maybe MD Anderson can find a cookie cutter at Duke when it seeks its next president, which cannot happen soon enough. The current MD Anderson president doesn’t see anyone as greater than himself and that’s the problem.
