Yale alumnus funds new cancer hospital

Former chair of Playtex provides transformational gift to support comprehensive care facility.

Since his graduation from Yale College in 1954, Joel E. Smilow has made donations to his alma mater that have endowed a head football coach position; the renovation and expansion of the Lapham Field House, now called the Smilow Field Center; and five other coaching positions. He also played a key role in the implementation of his class’ $120 million gift to Yale, the largest class gift in the university’s history. For his fundraising efforts, including stewardship of the university’s “… and for Yale” capital campaign in the 1990s, he received the university’s highest honor, the Yale Medal, in 1993.

On October 31, before some 200 guests gathered in the East Pavilion of Yale-New Haven Hospital (YNHH), Smilow, the former CEO, chair and president of Playtex, was thanked for his transformational gift supporting a new $467 million cancer hospital, now under construction. When it opens in 2009, the comprehensive patient care facility will be known as the Smilow Cancer Hospital.

“We are building one of the finest patient-focused cancer care facilities in the country,” said Marna P. Borgstrom, M.P.H. ’79, president and CEO of YNHH. “We are very grateful for Joel and Joan Smilow’s overwhelmingly generous gift to the cancer hospital, and for sharing our vision of creating a place of hope and compassion for cancer patients.”

The new hospital will integrate all oncology patient services at YNHH and the School of Medicine in one building specifically designed to deliver multidisciplinary cancer care, and will feature specialized facilities for faculty physicians and community-based providers to care for patients. The 14-story facility will add nearly 500,000 square feet of new space and 112 inpatient beds, along with expanded outpatient treatment facilities, operating rooms and infusion suites; a specialized women’s cancer center focused on breast cancer and gynecologic oncology; and a dedicated floor each for diagnostic and therapeutic radiology.

President Richard C. Levin also expressed gratitude for the Smilows’ donation. “This generous gift will have a lasting impact on the lives of countless patients who will benefit from the state-of-the-art clinical care,” he said. “We are deeply thankful for Joel and Joan’s dedicated support.”

According to Robert J. Alpern, M.D., dean of the School of Medicine and Ensign Professor of Medicine, the new cancer hospital will transform cancer care at Yale for both doctors and patients. “Medical school faculty members will be able to offer the latest cutting-edge therapies, integrating improved care—which will be much more comfortable for our patients—with clinical research,” Alpern said. “Joel and Joan Smilow are assuring the future of a very important aspect of patient care at Yale.”

“Great facilities,” Smilow said, “help you attract and motivate outstanding people and make it easier for them to interrelate with one another. That’s where the longer-term payoff comes. The immediate benefits—providing a better place for healing and helping tens of thousands of victims of cancer—are obvious. We can only dream about the day when the building isn’t needed because we’ve found a cure for cancer.”

—Michael Fitzsousa

Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine cover

After hard times, a student-run journal rides high again as an online publication

When Milton C. Winternitz, M.D., dean of the medical school from 1920 to 1935, conceived of the Yale system of medical education, a key element was a student-run journal that would serve not only as a place for students to publish their original research, but as a learning tool as well.

The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine (YJBM) made its debut in October 1928. It has been published continuously ever since and remains the longest-running medical journal edited and published by students.

Despite its pedigree, the future of the YJBM in recent years was uncertain. Faced with financial insecurity and the departure of its longtime faculty advisor and the editorial coordinator, publication of the quarterly journal had slowed to a crawl by the summer of 2006.

But thanks to the efforts of student editors determined to turn the journal around, as well as support from faculty, administrators and alumni, the YJBM is back on track and arguably stronger than ever, with a new editorial coordinator, Karen E. Olson, and a new website. As of last summer, the journal was available on PubMed Central, the National Institutes of Health’s digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.

“The journal is part of the history of the Yale medical school,” said Jeffrey R. Bender, M.D., HS ’83, the Robert I. Levy Professor of Preventive Cardiology and the journal’s faculty advisor. “It’s carved into the fabric of the school, one of the pieces that makes the Yale medical school unique.”

Bender credits the two editors who served during the current academic year, doctoral candidates Janice Friend (molecular, cellular and developmental biology) and Kristin Patrick (microbiology), with putting the journal back on a solid footing. Their immediate predecessors, medical student Adam Licurse and graduate student Richard Wing, also led the journal through a difficult transition. Their efforts have included aggressively soliciting high-quality papers and instituting a well-organized structure for reviewing manuscripts and responding to contributors. Former Deputy Dean for Education Herbert S. Chase, M.D., made the journal’s transition to stability one of his final projects before departing in 2006, and his successor, Richard Belitsky, M.D., has continued to provide financial support.

Bender said the YJBM ties in with the school’s educational mission. “It’s a chance for students to learn about peer review, which is a huge part of science, and about editing and scientific writing. It’s a superb form of early training.”

Patrick, who took over as co-editor in chief in April 2007, said she and an editorial team of roughly 10 have worked to broaden the submission pool and seek out the best work. “Our standards have risen significantly,” she said. “Good quality-controlled experiments and well-written papers are our long-term goal.”

Friend, who is interested in a career in scientific publishing, said her work with YJBM has been invaluable. “I’ve learned a great deal about what makes a good or successful article, how to effectively solicit articles, what does and does not work in delegating tasks, and tactful communication with authors.”

To keep the journal headed in the right direction, board members are exploring ways to promote and advertise it. They’ve also started recruiting new medical and graduate students to staff the journal. “The goal is to become self-perpetuating, so we don’t face the kind of problems we had before,” Patrick said.

—Jennifer Kaylin

For more information about the YJBM, or for guidelines for authors or article request forms, visit YJBM.yale.edu.

Actress-writer returns to New Haven with a drama about the resilience of the human body

About eight years ago, Asghar Rastegar, M.D., deputy chair of internal medicine and professor of internal medicine (nephrology), was deeply influenced by someone he credits with making him a better doctor. That person isn’t an older, more seasoned clinician or a brilliant, innovative scientist, but an actress and writer—Anna Deavere Smith.

“She finds meaning in the most common response,” Rastegar said. “She hears things nobody else could.” While physicians typically bring the science of medicine to the healing process, Rastegar said, Smith’s compassionate portrayals shine the light on patients’ humanity.

In January, Smith opened her latest work, Let Me Down Easy, at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre. It is her second work with strong Yale connections.

Her first came about after Rastegar and Ralph I. Horwitz, M.D., FW ’77, then chair of the Department of Internal Medicine, saw one of Smith’s performances in 2000. They concluded that medical students and residents would become better doctors if they could observe the way she interacts with people to gather her material. They invited Smith to the medical school as a visiting professor, and after some dogged persuasion, she agreed. Arriving in the summer of 2000, Smith interviewed physicians, nurses, patients and their families. The result was Rounding It Out, a 90-minute exploration of the ways in which doctors and patients view and communicate with one another. Her work, which included portrayals of such faculty as Rastegar, Margaret J. Bia, M.D., FW ’78, professor of medicine, and Forrester A. Lee, M.D. ’79, HS ’83, assistant dean of multicultural affairs, was performed twice at the medical school to packed houses.

Since then, Smith has broadened and expanded Rounding It Out into a full-blown theatrical production with a broader focus on the resilience and fragility of the human body. That work—Let Me Down Easy—includes material from Rounding It Out and portrayals of survivors of the Rwandan genocide, cancer survivor Lance Armstrong, a supermodel, AIDS victims in South Africa and a New Orleans physician who assured her hospitalized patients after Hurricane Katrina that rescuers would come for them even as her own doubts increased.

Smith also portrayed one of Rastegar’s longtime patients. “I treated her for six years,” Rastegar said during a discussion after one of Smith’s performances. “What Anna got out of her in a few hours she had never shared with me.”

“I usually don’t like being interviewed, but I don’t remember her prompting or asking me anything,” said Lee, who also joined in that discussion. “That is her special talent. I totally enjoyed the experience.”

The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1996, Smith is credited with creating a new form of theater. She depicts a range of characters in her one-woman shows, using her subjects’ own words and minimal props to offer multiple points of view. Her plays have explored such issues as the racial tensions between blacks and Jews in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights in 1991 and the Los Angeles riots in the wake of the Rodney King police brutality trial in 1992. Smith’s exceptional ability to inhabit the people she is portraying once prompted The New York Times to call her “the ultimate impressionist: she does people’s souls.”

—Jennifer Kaylin

A new Yale initiative promotes health issues as a tool of diplomacy

In the summer of 2006, Youssra Marjoua experienced, as she puts it, an “aha” moment. Marjoua, a third-year medical student who was researching maternal health in Nigeria, saw how the field intersected with such issues as poverty, housing, education and women’s empowerment. “No one global health challenge is an entity in and of itself,” she said. “You can’t talk about these things without including the whole.”

That epiphany has led Marjoua to focus on a new concept that is gaining currency in public health circles: health diplomacy—the idea that the networks and cooperation developed around health promotion and disease eradication could be leveraged to address problems traditionally considered outside the realm of public health, such as preventing or ameliorating conflicts and war.

Marjoua is one of about a dozen medical and public health students who, under the direction of Kaveh Khoshnood, M.P.H. ’89, Ph.D. ’95, assistant professor of epidemiology and public health, have formed the Health Diplomacy Initiative at Yale (HDI). Its aim is to promote dialogue within and beyond the Yale community on the value of having health considerations play a more prominent role in international relations and foreign policy. Khoshnood has received $10,000 from the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies to host four health diplomacy seminars during this academic year.

Leading organizations and journals are taking the notion of health diplomacy seriously. The World Health Organization devoted its March 2007 bulletin to the subject of health and foreign policy, and such medical journals as The Lancet and JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association have editorialized in support of health diplomacy. The Aspen Institute devoted a session to global health diplomacy in a health forum last year, and the University of California, San Francisco, is planning to include health diplomacy in its Global Health Sciences program.

The AIDS epidemic, said Khoshnood, is the landmark event that showed that health threats don’t recognize borders and can destabilize the political, economic and social structures of countries. “AIDS shook up segments of the government that would otherwise be uninterested in health issues,” Khoshnood said.

Along with SARS and avian flu, the AIDS epidemic provides an opening for public health professionals to become significant players in international diplomacy. “We’re seen as being in the ‘caring’ profession,” Khoshnood said. “We come in with all these positive feelings and without any particular political agenda. Why can’t we use this standing as a force for good?”

Marjoua sees health diplomacy as a “novel and great idea.” She’s hoping HDI will explore ways in which health can be used to shape diplomatic decision making for the better. “I’m interested in how the rise in health policy in foreign policy discussions can transform foreign policy.”

Khoshnood shares her enthusiasm. The only downside he foresees is that health diplomacy could be co-opted by governments to advance political agendas. “I hate to think that health would be used that way,” he said. But so far, he believes that the potential benefits are worth the risk.

—J.K.

et cetera

Yale joins in HPV vaccine study

The School of Public Health and the Connecticut Department of Public Health are studying the effects of a vaccine against the leading cause of cervical cancer—the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV).

Although the body’s immune system clears most HPV infections, some cause precancerous lesions and cervical cancer. In the United States, 6.2 million new infections are diagnosed each year.

The vaccine Gardasil, marketed by Merck, is licensed for females 9 to 26 years old and targets strains of the virus that are thought to cause 70 percent of cervical cancers and strains that cause 90 percent of genital warts. The Yale office of the Connecticut Emerging Infections Program will survey pathology laboratories and health care providers to determine whether new diagnoses of precancerous lesions have declined since the introduction of the vaccine.

Linda M. Niccolai, Ph.D., assistant professor of epidemiology, is the director of the project.

—John Curtis

Award for Doonesbury cartoonist

The travails of the “Doonesbury” character B.D. as he readjusts to civilian life after losing a leg in Iraq won the comic strip’s creator, Garry Trudeau, the annual Mental Health Research Advocacy Award from the Department of Psychiatry in April. The award recognizes contributions that advance research designed to improve the lives of people with mental illness. The department cited Trudeau’s “humorous but moving” accounts of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Trudeau provides millions of Americans with a gut-level appreciation of the impact of post-traumatic stress disorder on soldiers and their families as well as the real opportunities for obtaining help with the readjustment process,” said John Krystal, M.D., professor of clinical pharmacology and deputy chair for research in psychiatry. “He is helping to raise awareness about the importance of PTSD as a national challenge, where investment in treatment and research could have an important and lasting impact.”

—John Dillon


			Originally published in Yale Medicine, Spring 2008. Copyright © 2008 Yale University School of Medicine. All rights reserved.