In the dean’s office, it takes a brain surgeon

Running the med school is a complex task, which may be why Yale tapped Dennis Spencer as interim dean.

On a Monday afternoon in late June, close to a hundred senior faculty members filled the Historical Library to witness a changing of the guard. Then-Dean David A. Kessler, M.D., was about to announce his departure for the University of California, San Francisco, where he had been named vice chancellor for medical affairs and dean of the school of medicine. Standing next to Yale President Richard C. Levin was a tall, bespectacled man in a dark suit and white beard who has a passion for cultivating water lilies and has been sighted more than once on Cedar Street astride a Harley-Davidson.

“You may be asking yourself, as I did, ‘Why Spencer?’” the new interim dean, neurosurgeon Dennis D. Spencer, M.D., HS ’77, said a few minutes later, evoking a laugh from the crowd. Looking at Levin, he went on: “He chose a surgeon, and so I thought maybe he wants quick decisions. So I’ve made two already. First I will decree that the first floor of the Air Rights Garage will be reserved for the exclusive use of motorcycles. Second, I have just decided that the third-year medical students will now be required to do a three-month rotation in neurosurgery.”

The room erupted in laughter and thus Spencer took the helm—at least for a time—of the medical school where he began his career in 1972 as a resident. The moment summed up much about the person who has led neurosurgery since 1987, building the section into a free-standing department in 1997 and serving as its chair: people notice him, they listen and they seem to enjoy the experience. “He’s the quintessential neurosurgeon and a wonderful exemplar of the physician-scientist,” said Carolyn W. Slayman, Ph.D., deputy dean for academic and scientific affairs and Sterling Professor of Genetics.

Spencer himself sees the post as an opportunity to keep the school on a steady course during a time of transition, and to move it ahead in certain critical areas pending the appointment of a permanent successor to Kessler, who came to Yale as dean in 1997.

In July, Spencer said that his initial areas of focus would be faculty recruitment, fund-raising and shepherding the allocation of laboratory and office space that becomes available as more than 700 investigators move into the Anlyan Center for Medical Research and Education. He said that Kessler’s “outstanding recruitments over the last few years” of senior faculty members have equipped the school with “an excellent complement in faculty leadership right now. … At this stage we’re focusing on mid-level positions—some senior, some junior, too, but primarily mid-level positions that have been created in the process of bringing in new department chairs.”

Spencer also noted President Levin’s announcement on June 23 of a $50 million matching endowment fund for the medical school. “This promise is very real, and it’s going to be the top thing on our agenda,” Spencer said.

A graduate of Grinnell College and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Spencer came to Yale in 1972 as a resident in the Section of Neurosurgery. He served as chief resident, then joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1977. Over the next 25 years, working with colleagues including his wife, Susan S. Spencer, M.D., FW ’78, a Yale neurologist and past president of the American Epilepsy Society, he developed new approaches to the surgical treatment of epilepsy and new models for understanding the biochemical and physiological mechanisms of the disease.

In a September e-mail message to faculty, Levin announced the formation of a 15-member advisory committee to assist him in the selection of the next dean. “The committee’s first task will be to assist me in evaluating the 41 candidates who have been identified by nominations and in my conversations with the department chairs and other leaders of the School,” he wrote. “If a wider search is undertaken, I will seek the committee’s advice on how to proceed.”

In the interview, Spencer said he had not decided “whether to think about [the deanship] as a full-time position” and is focusing his attention on the tasks before him. He has appointed Joseph M. Piepmeier, M.D., HS ’82, as the interim chair of the Department of Neurosurgery and cut back his time in the operating room and clinic.

“My role is to keep things moving forward, and if Rick Levin thought that was important and that I was the right person to try to do that, I’m happy to do it, however long it takes,” Spencer said.

Levin praised Kessler for “six years of accomplishment and real advances for the school,” notably the completion of the Anlyan Center and the recruitment of more than a dozen department chairs and program leaders. “This is a moment of sadness but also excitement as he takes on what is a tremendous new challenge,” Levin said.

—Michael Fitzsousa

A security review drags on, devastating a scientist and derailing cutting-edge work

As a scientist, Heng Zhu, Ph.D., is used to dead ends, setbacks and roadblocks. But nothing prepared him for the obstacles he would encounter this past year when he tried to renew his expired visa and continue working as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology.

“It screwed up my life totally,” said Zhu. “I wasn’t able to work for a year, and I lost my fellowship.” Without an income, Zhu also lost his apartment and car, and his credit rating was ruined. Because he was stranded in China for months, he and his fiancée broke up.

Zhu’s troubles began in March 2002, when he realized he had let his work visa expire. Returning to his native China to renew it, he wound up languishing in Beijing for a year while the State Department did a security review. He was finally allowed to re-enter the United States in mid-April of this year.

Zhu, 35, became mired in the quicksand of heightened security measures implemented after the September 11 terrorist attacks. His case drew national attention, in part because his delay was longer than most, but also because his work is groundbreaking and well-known.

“He invented a whole new technology that has enormous value for understanding basic biological processes,” said Michael Snyder, Ph.D., chair of Zhu’s department. Snyder said Zhu developed a method to study the function of all 6,300 proteins encoded in the yeast genome. Zhu’s work, likely to aid drug discovery efforts, yielded a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

When Zhu got stranded in China, Snyder and others circulated a petition, wrote to congressional representatives and called the State Department, all to no avail. The State Department doesn’t respond to questions about particular cases, said Bureau of Consular Affairs spokesperson Stuart Patt.

At Yale Zhu is not alone. According to Ann Kuhlman, director of the Office of International Students and Scholars, about 20 foreign undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs and faculty members experienced visa delays during the 2002-03 academic year.

Zhu finally renewed his visa and returned to New Haven—but not for long. Late in the summer, as his postdoctoral position at Yale came to an end, he accepted a faculty position at Johns Hopkins.

Although he’s back in the United States and his career is back on track, Zhu will never recover the time he lost at Yale. “I can’t turn back the clock—that’s the bottom line—which is a loss to Yale and the United States as well as to me.”

—Jennifer Kaylin

Neuropeptide’s presence in high levels suggests soldiers are born, not made

Contrary to the image of hardened drill sergeants molding untrained youths into skilled fighting machines, a Yale psychiatrist suspects that some soldiers may be born that way.

Charles A. Morgan III, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry, studied troops taking a rigorous survival course at Ft. Bragg, N.C., home to the XVIII Airborne Corps, to see whether some handled stress better than others. Working with researchers from the base, he found that the Army Special Forces, also known as Green Berets, consistently outperformed the other soldiers. When he looked at the levels of neuropeptide Y, a brain chemical that is linked to stress, he noticed that the Berets released higher levels during periods of stress and then returned to baseline more quickly once the stress was removed.

“As a group, the Special Forces were releasing so much more, we could identify who was in that unit just by looking at the numbers,” Morgan said. “The more neuropeptide Y they were releasing during stress, the fewer symptoms of confusion or mental disconnection during stress were reported.” During their training, soldiers are deprived of food and sleep, pursued through rough terrain by other soldiers acting as the enemy and, if “captured,” subjected to interrogation.

Morgan has published his research in several journals, most recently last year in Biological Psychiatry. But as soldiers prepared to go to war in Iraq in the spring, Morgan’s studies drew attention from the national press.

He says the question raised by his findings is whether the Special Forces soldiers have always released higher levels of the chemical or whether their training somehow enhanced their ability to do so. “I don’t think that’s likely. I think those guys are just different,” Morgan said, “but we’re still testing that hypothesis.”

Morgan’s findings could help the Army select the most likely candidates for dangerous duty, but there are also civilian applications. “Because we found that neuropeptide Y is low in people with anxiety disorders and depression, this raises the possibility of new ways of treating them. One might expect that pharmacologic agents that act as agonists at the npy-1 receptor might diminish anxiety,” he said.

Morgan is now looking at ways to help soldiers bounce back from stressful situations more quickly and manage stress more effectively so they don’t make costly—or deadly—mistakes.

—Jennifer Kaylin

Keep religion out of stem cell research, Reeve urges medical school audience

Social and religious conservatives have robbed American scientists of their chance to play a leading role in the promising field of stem cell research, actor and writer Christopher Reeve said during a visit to the medical school in April. “We’re giving away our pre-eminence in science and medicine,” he said. “We’re going to lose incredibly valuable time.

“When matters of public policy are being decided, no religion should have a seat at the table—that is what is provided for in the Constitution,” Reeve said. Yet religious conservatives, including the Pope, he said, “have an undue influence in the debate.”

Because of their plasticity—their ability to differentiate into any cell in the human body—stem cells “have unlimited potential to cure disease,” Reeve told the crowd that filled the auditorium of the Anylan Center for Medical Research and Education. Reeve also hopes that stem cell research will lead to a cure for paralysis such as his, the result of a 1995 riding accident.

In a talk sponsored by the Yale Stem Cell Interest Group, Reeve criticized President Bush’s order of August 9, 2001, restricting federal funding for embryonic stem cell research to only 64 extant cell lines. (Last May, National Institutes of Health Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., acknowledged that only 11 of those lines were eligible for federal research funds.) Reeve suggested that the decision made no ethical sense in light of Bush’s objection to using embryos for research. “Those lines were derived from leftover embryos from infertility clinics. Did he suddenly develop a new morality effective August 10th?”

Reeve noted that, although typically about a third of embryos are discarded as medical waste, even vocal opponents of using embryos for research have never suggested banning in vitro fertilization. “They know very well that you can’t go to a couple and say, ‘You can’t have a child this way.’”

President Bush has followed his ruling on stem cells with a call for a ban on all forms of human cloning, whether therapeutic or reproductive. Reeve made a distinction between reproductive cloning of human beings (which “sounds like Frankenstein’s work,” and which he opposes) and cloning stem cells from embryos and adult tissues for research. Reeve rejected the implication “that science has no ethics and that it will run rampant if religion and conservative ideologies aren’t brought into the picture.”

He called stem cell research “the future of science.” “There’s going to be a seismic shift,” Reeve told an audience composed largely of medical and doctoral students, “and you will ride the wave into an era when stem cells will be able to aid millions of people.” He urged the audience to “make it happen here,” but advised young scientists to leave the United States and pursue the research elsewhere, if necessary. “It’s a big world. … If you really want to heal people, you go where the work is being done.

“Even though I sit here in a wheelchair, frustrated by today’s public policy, I’m very hopeful about tomorrow and what will be achieved,” Reeve said. “And so, go do it.”

—Cathy Shufro

Warshaw returns for symposium

For the second year, Joseph B. Warshaw, M.D., former deputy dean and chair of pediatrics, visited Yale from his post as dean of the University of Vermont College of Medicine. Eight scientists from around the country came to Yale in March to discuss the cardiovascular system at the Joseph B. Warshaw Symposium on Developmental Biology. Clifford W. Bogue, M.D., HS ’90, FW ’93, chief of the pediatric intensive care unit, welcomed Warshaw, describing him as a “leader in pediatrics throughout his career,” with a strong interest in nurturing pediatric scientists.

Et Cetera

University, unions settle strike

As Yale Medicine went to press, the university and two major unions representing close to 4,000 workers had reached a tentative agreement to end a three-and-a-half-week strike, the ninth on the campus in 35 years.

The agreement, which had yet to be ratified by union members, resulted in unprecedented eight-year contracts with the two unions. It was reached on September 18 after a series of bargaining sessions involving President Richard C. Levin and John W. Wilhelm, president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union. Mayor John DeStefano Jr. served as mediator.

Members of Local 34, which represents clerical and technical workers, and Local 35, representing service and maintenance employees, walked off their jobs on August 27. In March the unions struck for a week. The recent strike coincided with students returning to campus, drew national attention and brought the Rev. Jesse Jackson as well two presidential candidates to campus in support of the strikers.

The two sides were at odds over salaries, job security, retroactive pay and pensions. Details of the settlement were not available.

—Jennifer Kaylin

Spellbound by spelling

Don’t count on keeping up with the competitors in Spellbound, the Oscar-nominated documentary about the 1999 National Spelling Bee. But if you see the movie, you may spot three members of the medical school community.

They include Suzanne P. Lagarde, M.D., HS ’77, FW ’80, assistant clinical professor of medicine, and David Stagg, Ph.D., research scientist in pharmacology, parents of Emily Stagg, one of eight children profiled in the film. Emily’s participation introduced Lagarde and Stagg to the spelling bee subculture, in which the Paideia, a collection of spelling bee words, is considered the Bible. Emily’s strategy was to learn roots from four languages.

Eighth-grader Emily was one of 250 finalists from a field of 9 million competitors. So how did she do? See the film, with its cameo of the 1971 champion, Jonathan P.S. Knisely, M.D., associate professor of therapeutic radiology. His winning word: “shalloon.”

—Cathy Shufro


			Originally published in Yale Medicine, Autumn 2003. Copyright © 2003 Yale University School of Medicine. All rights reserved.