Nutrition from the Inside Out (original) (raw)

Annual Review of Nutrition

Although I am now officially an alumnus of Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, I actually attended Seton Hall College of Medicine in Jersey City, New Jersey. During my senior year, the school changed from a private school to a state institution, becoming New Jersey College of Medicine. Because this change was associated with some disruption due to movement of clinical facilities from Jersey City to Newark, I spent a large fraction of my senior year on the Harriet Lane pediatric service at Johns Hopkins Hospital and on the Boston University medical service at Boston City Hospital. At the end of my senior year, I received a diploma from New Jersey College of Medicine, a school at which I spent almost no time. In the following 47 years, the school underwent a number of name changes, formally becoming part of Rutgers in 2013. I find this hopefully final resting place an excellent one both because of the quality of the institution itself and because none of the classical, pre-Revolution colonial colleges with medical schools would likely have considered me a serious candidate for admission at the time I sought entry. As I prepared to complete my medical school education, I was seriously committed to remaining at East Coast academic institutions for my house officer training, having lived my entire life in the Northeast after my birth in Hoboken, New Jersey. For this reason, all but one of the hospitals to which I applied for pediatric house staff training were associated with the big name medical schools from Baltimore to Boston along the East Coast. Given that I had just spent a highly productive period at Johns Hopkins, I had convinced myself that I would match to the Harriet Lane pediatric service. As fate would have it, during the application period one of my sisters was married in California, and I visited the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), after I attended the wedding. I did so because I knew Melvin M. Grumbach, an internationally known pediatric endocrinologist from Columbia University, had just accepted the chairmanship of the Department of Pediatrics. I had also heard that Abraham M. Rudolph, another international superstar from the East Coast, had been recruited to the department as its new director of the Division of Pediatric Cardiology. Thus, because San Francisco also appeared to be an exciting place to live in the mid-1960s, I included UCSF as the only non-East Coast school on my match list. Imagine my surprise on Match Day when I learned that I had been matched to UCSF. In retrospect, it was the most important event in my life not only because I met my wife at UCSF, but also because the academic physician scientists who mentored me there paved the road on which I built my subsequent career. While a medical student, I had developed a serious interest in the role of intermediary metabolism in the pathogenesis of diseases. In part, this was because it was the era of intense biochemical delineation of the metabolic derangements in the classical inborn errors of metabolism, and I was increasingly interested in clinical metabolic problems. My interest was due in part to the academic scholarly direction encouraged by my faculty mentor at Seton Hall, Theodore Kushnick, a professor of pediatrics with an eidetic memory who knew, in minute detail, every clinical and biochemical finding in children with inborn metabolic disorders. During my house staff training, my desire to become an academic physician scientist became firmly established owing to the exemplary models of physician scientists such as Mel Grumbach and Selna L. Kaplan in pediatric endocrinology, Abe Rudolph and Julien I.E. Hoffman in pediatric cardiology, and William H. Tooley in neonatology who showed by daily example that physicians could deliver the highest-quality clinical care while conducting patient-oriented research into the www.annualreviews.org • Nutrition from the Inside Out 3