From the President’s Desk: Best-kept secret in medicine
June 2019—I wasn’t one of those kids who always knew they wanted to be a doctor. Science was a powerful draw, which might have suggested medical school if my sister hadn’t gotten there first. But she did, so I majored in chemistry at Vanderbilt. As an undergraduate with little money, I hoped to fast-track, so I found a summer job anesthetizing laboratory rats in the middle of the night and removing their kidneys. The work supported a group studying the renin-angiotensin system. They thought I had a knack for surgery, which prompted a reassessment of my chemistry major and eventually led to an application to medical school. Life makes choices for us sometimes, and I was lucky that way.