Victory
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/g-s1-112628/fresh-air-for-march-5-2026-sinners-actor-delroy-lindo?showDate=2026-03-05
This is not about the war in the Middle East.
On March 5, Terry Gross interviewed acclaimed actor Delroy Lindo about his career on the occasion of his first, ever Oscar nomination for his role in Sinners. In the course of the discussion, Ms. Gross asked Mr. Lindo about not having received such a nomination for his performance in Spike Lee’s sensational film Da 5 Bloods in 2020. It was widely assumed that such a nomination would be forthcoming as his performance was powerful and key to the film.
Lindo admitted that he had been sorely disappointed when he was passed over that year. He also received a phone call from Spike Lee shortly after the nominations were announced and his name was omitted. Lee simply encouraged him to keep working.
Lindo has done exactly that. He did not choose to pick up his ball and go home, but rather continued to give stellar performances on television and in the movies. His turn as the head of an all-Black law firm in The Good Fight is such an example. He is a powerful presence in a cast full of skilled women. He said in the interview that this nomination he considers a ”victory” for his choosing to press on despite disappointment.
This resonated with me greatly because most of us, including me, have had moments in our professional careers that are pregnant with disappointment despite having given everything we had in pursuing the job. It turns out that most people don’t really care that you were overlooked. As my father-in-law, an academic pulmonary pathologist of the highest order who was passed over on occasion for chair jobs before landing a big one at Mt. Sinai in New York, taught me, the time when you face disappointment and how you handle it is the time when everyone is watching.
Tom Brady turned out to be a pretty good quarterback even in Tampa Bay after New England. Alex Rodriguez hit a lot of home runs for the Yankees after Seattle. The recently deceased Neil Sedaka went 11 years between number one hits. Paul McCartney has done great work without the other Beatles. And when it comes to comebacks, can anyone top Donald Trump? I think not. Like him or not, he never quit.
I think this is a very potent lesson for younger people in academic medicine. Now, more than ever, the deck is stacked against having a successful and fulfilling career in our business. Grant money, which is still the coin of the realm, is harder to find than ever. Clinical expectations in terms of patients seen and RVUs generated seem to go up every year. How is anyone supposed to put a career together as a physician-investigator? That academic species may be extinct soon unless institutions use their resources to promote and support people who are facile in the laboratory and at the bedside. A direct appeal was made to us last year by Duke Medical School to help donate to a fund to do just that. And, we did.
In 1981, my Chief of Medicine at Duke and later my boss as the Director of the NIH, James Wyngaarden wrote an often quoted article entitled “The Clinical Investigator as an Endangered Species” in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine. He had delivered a talk about this subject as early as 1979. It looks like everything old is new again. Support for physician-investigators cannot end with funded MD-PhD programs. These special individuals must be nurtured throughout their careers.
Dr. Kleinerman and I were very lucky in that neither of us ever acquired a formal PhD, but both of us received the equivalent in nurturing in our lab careers by Duke Medical School faculty and the NIH staff. My fear is that almost no MD without a PhD has a prayer today getting research funding for a lab career and even the MD-PhDs will struggle unless the academic institutions purposefully invest in their activities to make discoveries in the lab and bring them to the bedside to help patients.
But, most importantly, those pursuing academic medicine can take a lesson from Delroy Lindo and do anything you can to keep working, being productive, making discoveries. I have now seen at least two research careers tanked by Peter Pisters and his dreadful academic leaders. That’s the opposite of what we need.
There has never been a better time to do science from the perspective of technology and computer power. There has also never been a worse one from the point of view of funding and protected time to do research for physicians. If you can keep doing science while you keep seeing patients, declare victory. You have earned it.
