Rc1a-c1aWCMwinter07 12/17/07 3:50 PM Page 1 WINTER 2007 THE MAGAZINE OF WEILL CORNELL MEDICAL COLLEGE AND WEILL CORNELL GRADUATE SCHOOL OF MEDICAL SCIENCES SPECIAL ISSUE & ANNUAL REPORT c2a-c2aWCMwinter07 11/29/07 4:22 PM Page 1 01-01WCMwinter07toc 12/18/07 11:01 AM Page 1 weillcornellmedicine THE MAGAZINE OF WEILL CORNELL MEDICAL COLLEGE AND WEILL CORNELL GRADUATE SCHOOL OF MEDICAL SCIENCES 2 8 22 18 GOING GLOBAL 2 DEANS MESSAGES JENNIFER ARMSTRONG Comments from Dean Gotto & Dean Hajjar The number of medical students who study abroad is on the rise, with many opting to visit underserved regions. For some, it’s a life-changing experience—as they see 4 SCOPE firsthand how health care is delivered in places where doctors are few, resources are Remembering Tom Shires. Plus: Hematolo- meager, and modern diagnostics are all but unheard of. gist heads medicine, inside the mind of Leonard Bernstein, Hippocratic T-shirt, 22 INTERNATIONAL INTRIGUE emergency update, and treating diabetes BETH SAULNIER with surgery. Early one morning in October, Dean Antonio Gotto and Board of Overseers Chairman 8 TALK OF THE GOWN Sanford Weill sat down with Weill Cornell Medicine to discuss the Medical College’s On the go in Ghana. Plus: A Fogarty fellow international interests. With the Qatar branch hitting its stride and a new affiliation in goes to India, the good works of “Aunt Tanzania, where will Weill Cornell focus its next global efforts? Ida,” a clinic for Sudan, foreign exchange, 26 OASIS OF KNOWLEDGE delivering babies in Tanzania, Qatar kudos, and international travelers get their shots. BETH SAULNIER Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar is about to graduate its inaugural class, 38 ANNUAL REPORT sixteen men and women from the Middle East and beyond. In less than a decade, Development report and donor list Cornell University and the emirate have gone from tentative steps toward collabora- for 2007 tion to a partnership that will grant the first MDs from an American medical school on foreign soil. 48 POST-DOC An extraordinary gentleman 32 25,000 : 1 TOBIN LEVY It’s the ratio of patients to physicians in Tanzania—compared with 400 to 1 in the Cover photograph provided by NASA U.S. But a new collaboration with the Weill Bugando medical school and hospital aims to narrow that gap. By helping to train the next generation of medical profes- For address changes and other sionals, Weill Cornell hopes to improve health care in a severely underserved country. subscription inquiries, please e-mail us at [email protected] Weill Cornell Medicine (ISSN 1551-4455) is produced four times a year by Cornell Alumni Magazine, 401 E. State St., Suite 301, Ithaca, NY 14850-4400 for Weill Cornell Medical College and Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. Third-class postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Public Affairs, 525 E. 68th St., Box 144, New York, NY 10065. WINTER 2007 1 02-03WCMwinter07deans 12/19/07 2:39 PM Page 2 dEANS mESSAGES FROM 1300 YORK AVENUE All the World Antonio M. Gotto Jr., MD, DPhil, Dean of the Medical College N THE PASTORAL COMEDY AS YOU LIKE IT, Many of WCMC-Q’s first students have already William Shakespeare’s Jaques famously declared: “All embraced a spirit of international collaboration. Muhamed the world’s a stage.” Although the oft-quoted passage Baljevic, Class of 2009, has become the first Qatar stu- relates life to a play and those doing the living as the dent to take a year out of the program to pursue a research iplayers, we at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill project. Thanks to the generosity of Ambassador Hushang Ansary, member of the Board of Overseers and chairman of the International Affairs Committee, he is working in the Ansary Center for Stem Cell Therapeutics on our New York City campus. When Muhamed returns to Doha, his burgeoning medical career will have been enriched because of his willingness to follow an academ- ic path that stretched beyond traditional borders. One of Weill Cornell’s missions is to ensure that such opportunities for research and partnership are avail- able to all who seek them. Currently, Weill Cornell enjoys affiliations with ten international institutions, including the Weill Bugando Medical Center in Tanzania, American Hospital in Paris, St. Luke’s Medical Center in the Philippines, and the Nightingale Hospital in Turkey. Next year, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center will celebrate ten years of collaboration with the Vehbi Koç Foundation American Hospital in Istanbul, a relationship that has its roots in my own thirty-year friendship with Mr. Koç. Also, construction of the new Cornell-GHESKIO Institute of Infectious GOOGLE EARTH Diseases and Reproductive Health is well under way in Cornell Medical Center can deduce more from those Haiti. Placed in the heart of the communities they serve, words. We know that all the world is our hospital, our these facilities not only administer care to the local pop- laboratory, and our classroom. ulation but allow for promising students to remain home Our presence in the global health community was for their medical studies. established long ago and has enjoyed continued growth As health care and disease prevention are very much and prominence. This fall, Weill Cornell Medical College global concerns, Weill Cornell must remain a global insti- in Qatar (WCMC-Q) enrolled its fourth class of students. tution, positioned at the forefront of the international The thirty-strong group is larger than its three predeces- medical community. We must realize that the scope of sors and welcomed students from Qatar, India, Lebanon, our work extends far beyond our own laboratories and Jordan, and the United States who are taking their first clinics. We must seek remedies for the many diseases steps toward becoming physicians. Our Qatar campus is that afflict our entire planet. Enlisting physicians, the first American medical school to be established over- researchers, and students from around the world can seas, joining the clinical and academic excellence of Weill only advance that goal. Cornell with the brightest international minds. — Dean Antonio Gotto 2 WEILL CORNELL MEDICINE 02-03WCMwinter07deans 12/18/07 4:08 PM Page 3 Beyond the Lab David P. Hajjar, PhD, Dean of the Graduate School of Medical Sciences ESEARCHERS ARE A TIRELESS SORT, STRIVING to construct meaningful analysis and theories from thousands of bits of data. Often, studies conducted at our medical and graduate schools rwill yield medicines and treatments that will be of great- est benefit to populations thousands of miles away. That is one of the vows of medicine—to offer aid wherever the need is greatest—and that often means leaving the com- fort of your own lab. Basic laboratory and patient-centered research can be even more effective when carried out in the heart of those needy areas. The Division of International Medicine and Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine boasts a number of accomplished physician-scientists who con- duct research in such varied locations as Brazil, Haiti, India, and Tunisia. The work at these international facili- ties involves prevention, pathogenesis, and the treatment of bacterial, viral, and parasitic infectious diseases. Our presence and ability to extend ourselves beyond the traditional laboratory setting has been invaluable from a research standpoint, since we are able to study disease and prevention where the burden of sickness is GOOGLE EARTH heaviest. That means malaria and sexually transmitted the Haitian population as it struggles with HIV and other diseases in Haiti, leptospirosis and bacterial meningitis in diseases. “The beauty of the work we do,” says Dr. Jean Brazil, and immunoregulation of host response to Pape, the director of GHESKIO and a professor of medi- antileishmanial therapy in India and Tunisia. cine, “is that we’re able to do the research and imple- In Brazil, researchers were able to single out a protein ment the results right away.” located on the surface of the bacterium Leptospira interro- Poorer nations are especially affected by infectious gans, which is responsible for leptospirosis, a major public disease, and by conducting research in those stricken health threat in the urban slums of developing countries areas we are giving a more immediate hope to those who like Brazil. The disease is passed from animals to humans will prosper most through our discoveries. This winter, a through close contact. Epidemics of rat-borne leptospiro- delegation from our New York City and Ithaca campuses sis occur annually in Brazil during the rainy season. will travel to India in search of increased and deeper col- Contributing researchers like our Dr. Albert Ko were able to laborations with the medical community there. The hope discover the active agent causing the disease—which was is to study the links among agriculture, nutrition, and previously unknown—where it wreaks the most havoc. infectious disease. Better farming could mean better food Perhaps no institution exemplifies the benefits of and, ultimately, better health. conducting research on the front lines better than Indeed, the research will tell us. GHESKIO, the clinic in Haiti that works directly with — Dean David Hajjar WINTER 2007 3 04-07WCMwinter07scope 12/18/07 11:04 AM Page 4 sCOPE NEWS BRIEFS NEIL SHAH Former Surgery Chairman Dies Dr. Photographer: This image of a Tanzanian marketplace was among the entries in the 2007 Medical Complex Art N OCTOBER, FORMER WEILL CORNELL PROFESSOR AND DEAN Show. It was taken by Neil Shah, MD ’07, during his six- G. Tom Shires, MD, passed away in Henderson, Nevada. He week rotation to Weill Bugando Medical Centre. Shah will was eighty-one and suffering from gastrointestinal cancer.