Chapter 02 : A Focused Student Intent on Science Education
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Description
In this chapter, Dr. Tweardy talks describes himself as a student, noting that he was always “on the spectrum” of autism and Asperger’s Syndrome, with an extraordinary ability to concentrate and a strong visual imagination. He describes his “excitement about everything” in elementary school and how he explored scientific topics, deciding he would be an astronomer. He explains how he zeroed in on engineering, so that when he was admitted to Princeton University [AB conferred, 1974, Cum Laude, Chemistry] he majored in aerospace engineering.
Dr. Tweardy compares the cultures of South Kent High School and Princeton.
Identifier
TweardyDJ_01_20190122_C02
Publication Date
1-22-2019
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
David J. Tweardy, MD, Oral History Interview, January 22, 2019
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Educational Path; Personal Background; Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, that’s a wonderful story. Now, tell me a little bit about what was going on with school at this time.
David Tweardy, MD:
Yeah, so it’s funny: I was just talking to my brother, Bill. Bill and I always thought --of all of my brothers, Bill and I were the most similar. We both became engineers; at least, we started as engineers. Bill actually graduated as a metallurgic engineer. I ended up enrolling at Princeton as an aerospace engineer, but that was in 1970. You’re much too young to remember this, but—
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
You’d be surprised. (laughter)
David Tweardy, MD:
But the bottom—
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
You’re only a couple years older than I am.
David Tweardy, MD:
Well, there you go. Maybe you’ll remember, although you had to kind of be in the right space, or a certain space. But 1970 is when Boeing started laying off people in Seattle at their plant. So being obviously very pragmatic, partly coming from a large family as an engineer, I wanted to have a job when I graduated. So I switched out of aerospace engineering into chemical engineering, because I really like chemistry.
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, I wanted to actually back up a little bit.
David Tweardy, MD:
Yeah, sure.
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Because—how did you track to that? I mean, what was your relationship with biology? I mean, going through all this school, and how were you sort of figuring out this is what I like, this I don’t like at all, these are what my talents are, that kind of thing?
David Tweardy, MD:
Yeah. Well, that’s—so this is something you tend to think about as a lifelong clinician or physician-scientist. You kind of think about, well, how did I get here? What were the influences and forces that led to me to become what I am today in my career? And I would say before you get to the chemistry, or chemical engineering, I guess I was—I think I was just a bit of a—I tell my wife, jokingly, I think I was on the spectrum. (laughs)
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Of?
David Tweardy, MD:
Of—oh, jeez, I’m blocking. I wanted to say Alzheimer’s. This is much too early for that.
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, oh, autism, or Asperger’s, or—yeah.
David Tweardy, MD:
Yeah, on that, because—and only in this regard: I just knew, even at a very early age, I had this just amazing ability to concentrate and think about just objects and things, and weigh things and balance things and kind of do these things that would be considered incredibly nerdy. But I just was completely fascinated with that stuff. And starting when I was three, and four, I mean, I just—we had these blocks, and I used to like to balance them, make sure they had the same amount of—and I just—and I could just do this. Of course—
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
And so that was also probably strongly visual? You have a visual imagination?
David Tweardy, MD:
Yes, visual. Yes. In fact, I think that’s a really important point, because I think that most scientists—among the very best scientists I know, they have the ability to just immediately understand the impact of something without a lot of—if it’s visually presented. And, frankly, also, kind of almost keep that—take that to memory and memorize it, and almost recall that at will in the future—
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
How do you see it? Is it forms? Is it symbols? Is it color? Is it not?
David Tweardy, MD:
Actually, it’s more—it’s the relation. It’s the relationship of one thing to the other.
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Is it moving?
David Tweardy, MD:
Actually, no. I think most of my ability to recognize and absorb information, generally it’s static, but it’s always relationship-oriented. It’s like this is different than this, and it’s the differences that seem to be—and when they’re depicted simply, but honestly and easily, they just immediately become apparent to me. And it’s like in graphs, for instance. I think I just have this thing for graphs. (laughs)
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Does that become part of your own shorthand for communicating with yourself as you’re generating ideas?
David Tweardy, MD:
I think it is, it does. In fact, I noticed that as I move into more—as I moved up into more and broader administrative roles, I’ve had to translate what I think is just so obviously --blatantly obvious into language that I think maybe others would understand more easily. And even now, I have to say even now, as I talk to Ron DePinho [oral history interview] and others, it’s like I still find it slightly frustrating that they don’t get it, when I think I’ve explained it in a way that --to me, if anybody explained it that way it would be, boom, I’d get it. So there’s kind of like—it’s my own—so this is my own internal language that I have to continually remind myself to externalize in order to communicate effectively.
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, I think that’s—people talk a lot about emotional intelligence versus not, communication across these boundaries, but very rarely do people talk about the gap that’s created amongst visual thinkers and non-visual thinkers.
David Tweardy, MD:
Yes.
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
And it’s huge. It is huge.
David Tweardy, MD:
And actually, I’m glad you mention it, because I cannot—one of my—I mean, in addition to building my own career, I have been really interested in growing the careers of those around me. I have mentored a lot of people, not as many as Ron, for instance, has, but certainly a good share. And one of my things I’ve noticed is that --I had a really outstanding postdoc, who was a pediatrician, but she was a totally verbal learner. And, in fact, so if you showed her the picture, it just didn’t click, but if you told her the story and all that, it jus … And she would—every time she would give presentations, she’d have a great figure on it, but her verbal abilities just really blew people out of the water, because—and she was a verbal learner and a verbal communicator. And, anyway, so she was the first person that I really noticed the difference between she and I, her and I myself, on this particular way we internalized information. She could read a paragraph and it was like—I have to translate the verbiage into a figure, and then I remember. Or, on the other hand, if they gave me the figure, no need to talk about it.
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
No need to talk. Oh, very interesting. Yeah, no, these differences are huge, and they really do influence—I mean, maybe not outcomes, but they do influence problem-solving styles—
David Tweardy, MD:
Yes.
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
—and communication. They really do.
David Tweardy, MD:
That’s right. That’s absolutely right. So, like I say, at a very early age I was doing these things, and then, in terms of just playing with blocks, (laughs) and doing things that all kids do, maybe with a little more intensity, I don’t know. Then I got into school, and very early on I was just—I guess I was a good reader. I learned to read quickly, and it was pretty much in second grade, the die was cast, because my—(laughs) So my second grade teacher—I’ll never forget her, Mrs. Hathaway—she—I was probably, in fact, I still am hyperactive, but you can imagine me as a second grader. I mean, it was like completely. The good news is, for me, I had a stern father, and if I didn’t have a stern father, I mean, it would’ve been (inaudible). Who knows what would’ve happened to me? Because I think I needed severe limits at an early age. And so in second grade, yeah, I was just so excited by everything, and so I would just bounce around. And so she made me—my desk was right in front of her, but she would let me go back, because in the back of the room there was a series of ten red science books, each with a topic: astronomy, geography, or Earth science, I guess, geophysics, biology. And, of course, I guess I was a quick student, so I’d get through the routine stuff quickly, and I’d be the usual, like, “What can I do? What can I do?” And so she would say, “David, you can go back and take a book.” So I read through them, and so by the end of the second grade I did this maybe third, fourth grade type equivalent science. I knew a bit of science across the spectrum of the sciences. And so I knew I wanted to do science. And when she asked me, “David, what do you want to do when you grow up?”, I said, “I want to be an astronomer.”
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, yeah, there you go.
David Tweardy, MD:
There we go. So I was going to be an astronomer. And then it moved to an astronaut, as I got a little older, because it was a combination of … And I did a lot of sports, so it kind of combined the intellectual, plus the athletic kind of thing. I remember Chuck Yaeger’s—or is it—the book that Tom Wolff wrote about the early astronauts—
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Don’t remember the name of it.
David Tweardy, MD:
Yeah, but it was this—that was the—and, of course, there was Sputnik. The other thing I remember very vividly driving my interest in science was the launch of Sputnik, and, of course, it just lit a fire under --anybody interested in doing science was even further motivated by the president. All the way—about to get out there and do good science, and make certain we don’t let (laughs) the Commies get ahead of us. I mean I was telling my son, I remember when we had air drills and we had to go hide under our desks. And so that was—this Communist threat was not necessarily real, but we were training, we were planning for it, so it was real enough. So the Sputnik, the science orientation, that just really cemented my interest in science. And then it was just a matter of what I would do in science. And, as I say, went through astronomy to astronaut, was too tall and blind to be an astronaut, (laughter) and so check that off the list. And then I used to—and probably the other thing that really cemented it is my dad was an electrician, and having a bunch of kids, I think he wanted to keep them quiet, and not out there—and so he would bring things from the mill that were leftovers that were going to be discarded. They were like neat little things. So my—I probably more than my brothers, because, again, of this visual/tactile thing, I would spend my winters between dinner and bedtime just what my dad would call puttering around in the basement, with all of the things that he had brought home. And I knew I was like, science projects, I just loved science projects. I made a couple science projects, did well at the science fair. I don’t think anybody was as interested in science, probably, as I was. (laughs) That was the simple interest. And so that, again, cemented the interest. And then, really, I had some good science teachers, but, frankly, not great science teachers in Monessen High School.
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So is there a story with you applying to Princeton from that particular school?
David Tweardy, MD:
Yes, so that’s what happened. So then it turns out—it’s very interesting how things work, and the role of kismet in one’s life. So by virtue of being the paperboy in third grade, applying for the prep school scholarship, getting it, going to South Kent, the science teacher at South Kent, who I adored, his father was on the Princeton admissions committee. He would interview and refer kids in to—and give them the kind of recommendations that can get you in. And so I was a good student. I was in the—my timing was good, because there was this sense of social justice being corrected in—and so I got into Princeton. And it was kind of funny, because —I remember some really—individuals with very nasal voices sort of telling me, “Tweardy, what do you think you’re doing here?” (laughs) thing. And I went, “Well, I just applied and got in.” It was one of those things that I was so—I mean, going to Princeton was a really interesting experience. The prep school already was interesting, because it was the East Coast. You know the phenotype. It wasn’t Andover/Exeter, but it was that scale of things. It was a really—it was the perfect school for me, though, because if I was going to go to a prep school from my background, the cultural differences could have been overwhelming. But the fortunate thing about the school was it had a really interesting philosophy. It was “Simplicity of life, directness of purpose” was its motto, and so everybody had a job there. I said, of course you have a job. I had a job at home; I’m going to have a job here. Of course. What do you expect? And sort of it drove—it forced equality in this regard around resources. You got 45 cents for an allowance per week, (laughs) and the candy store where you could use it was open for an hour on Saturday, right before the movie. So, basically, everybody—there were no high-rollers in the school. Everybody was pretty much driven down to a common denominator.
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, they clearly made some serious decisions about value systems and—
David Tweardy, MD:
Oh, they did, and this school—
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, very interesting.
David Tweardy, MD:
South Kent was sort of a derivative of Kent, and the reasons South Kent was created was because the principals that were—in 1923, I think it was George Bartlett—not George, actually, Samuel Bartlett, and another gentleman whose name I don’t recall, were a little worried about the direction that Kent was taking. It was more—you can imagine in the ’20s it was drifting more towards a lack of principles, basic principles, and so that’s why they formed South Kent, and they adhered to those through till the ’80s.
Tacey. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Very interesting.
Recommended Citation
Tweardy, David J. MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 02 : A Focused Student Intent on Science Education" (2019). Interview Chapters. 1384.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1384
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