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Some of you will remember I started in college at Rice but I switched to Education in my second year and returned to KU because Rice didn’t have an Education Dept at that time. After multiple other switches and a year of research after graduation I ended up in medical school, which I simply loved. I chose to do pediatrics after flirting with internal medicine and matched for internship at Children’s Hospital Boston, which is Harvard Medical School’s principal pediatrics hospital. I started my internship in 1967 and have been at Boston Children’s and Harvard ever since, except for a three year stint at the National Institutes of Health after residency, learning protein chemistry, and two years in the mid-80’s at MIT’s Whitehead Institute learning how to clone and sequence DNA and engineer genes.
I chose to direct my research toward red blood cell membranes, which were a complete black box when I started working on them in medical school, but gradually yielded up their secrets. I had enough of a head start to become a leader in the field and was successful in developing a basic model for the structure of the red cell membrane that is still accepted, and in discovering the molecular defects in the membrane that cause hereditary spherocytosis, an anemia that afflicts about 1 to 2 million people in the world. Understanding the disease took 30 years, but it is among my most satisfying accomplishments.
I was appointed Chief of Hematology/Oncology at Boston Children's in 1984 and led the division for 23 years, increasing the faculty from about 20 to nearly 100, supervising the training of about 220 young hematologists and oncologists, many of whom are now leaders in the field, including the current Dean of Harvard Medical School. The heme/onc program here leads in a variety of fields, including stem cell biology, cancer biology, genomics and blood cell formation. Along the way I’ve had a chance to care for a lot of wonderful children, many with mysterious anemias referred from around the world, and to teach the Harvard medical students and Children’s Hospital residents and fellows hematology and pediatrics.
I stepped down as division chief in 2007 to spend more time in resident education. Currently I run the intern selection program (we get ~1800 applications for 58 places). I’ve also had a lot to do with the design and construction of the hospital and research buildings at Children’s over 25 years. Maybe I would have been an architect if I hadn't chosen science and medicine.
I met my first wife, Nan Scamman, at KU and we had three absolutely wonderful children—Alison, Geoff and Marcia. Nan and I gradually grew apart and divorced after 19 years but remained good friends and worked closely together to raise the kids. Alison and Marcia also became doctors. Both trained at here at Harvard and now are in practice: Alison is a family physician in Milwaukee, and Marcia is a hospitalist and Chief of Internal Medicine at a hospital in Jackson, WY. Geoff is a senior pilot for Jet Blue and lives just outside of Charlotte, NC.
For many years I worked at The Jackson Laboratory, a world-class center for genetics research on Mt Desert Island next to Acadia National Park for three months every summer. My second wife, Kathryn John and I lived at a small place on the ocean nearby and all the kids and my six grandchildren joined us each August. Sadly Kathryn died just before the pandemic in 2019 and my long term neuropathy has slowly progressed to the point that I am no longer sufficiently mobile to spend summers there.
After Kathryn died I downsized and moved to a new senior living center on the Boston-Brookline border not far from my long time Brookline home. The center is lovely and much easier for me to negotiate. I continue to work nearly full time, recruiting pediatric interns to Boston Children's Hospital and teaching and mentoring residents and fellows.
