Chapter 03: On Faculty at UCSD: Leadership, Mentoring, and a Philosophy of Character
Files
Identifier
MendelsohnJ_01_20050103_C03
Publication Date
1-3-2005
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
John Mendelsohn, MD, Oral History Interview, January 03, 2005
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Overview; Overview; Professional Path; Evolution of Career; Leadership; On Leadership; Mentoring; On Mentoring; The Researcher; Personal Background; Influences from People and Life Experiences
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
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: It [UCSD] was a brand new medical school. I was the twentieth faculty member in the department of medicine. There were two people in hematology and oncology. Two in pulmonary. Four in cardiology. And there were two in infectious diseases. And it was a tiny department so I, as an assistant professor, we got to know each other very well. The leader was a man named Eugene Braunwald who soon after left and went to the Peter M. Brigham, where I had trained, to be chairman of medicine. And he invited me to come along with him. And I had been at UCSD for two years and he invited me to come along and run the house staff program. But I wanted to do cancer research. By then I knew. So I turned him down and introduced him to one of my classmates, Dr. Marshall Wolf, who was at the Peter M. Brigham, who is legendary. I mean, he did a fabulous job of running the house staff program, and I stayed on at UCSD and developed the cancer program. Anyway, at UCSD, when I arrived, there were 80 medical students, 40 first year and 40 second year, and they were just entering the clinical year, and this little group of 20 people had to design the program, and I enjoyed that. I learned very quickly how to administrate and how to lead planning sessions and I was put in charge of the course introduction to clinical medicine, for sophomores, and I was a very active clinician in a clinic, but I was able to spend a lot of time in my laboratory studying lymphocytes getting grants and building up my research.
James Olson:
: What did you learn about administration? If you were going to sort of –
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: Yeah. Well, I learned from Braunwald a lot. This is – he was probably the most prominent medical investigator that was doing translational research in the country. And here he was chairman of medicine. And when I went into his office, he would always ask me how I was and he knew what was on my mind. Did you get your new house and how are your kids. And he cared about me as a person. But very quickly in his office, after two or three minutes, we’d move onto the problem we were discussing. He was always very frank. He would pull resources together. He gave me a copy of his first grant to use as an example. And if he could do something, he said yes, and if he couldn’t do something he said he’d look into it and let me know, or no. He didn’t equivocate. I was very impressed. He was a very direct man who knew what he wanted to do and knew how to stimulate people to buy into that vision. And I’m a very big believer that you incorporate the characteristics of the people you admire, you can build your own personality, I talk about this in our faculty training sessions. I can go all the way back into my childhood and give you role model examples. So this was a role model to be a leader and work with young people and motivate them and mentor them and coach them, even though you can’t spend a lot of time with them. And I’ve tried to do that my entire life.
James Olson:
: When you say you can build your own personality, tell me about that.
John Mendelsohn, MD:
: Well, you’re born with certain genetic traits. I learned I wasn’t going to be excited about math, even though I did pretty well at it. I liked people. And some of the things about your personality – I’m extroverted – that’s probably built in. But then how you – what’s your compartment, what’s your attitudes when you’re talking with people, when you’re doing things, I think you pick role models. When I was growing up, my parents were pretty social but it turned out that my best friend’s family and my girlfriend’s family, turns out their idea of a fun evening was to invite a few friends over, eat a slow dinner, and argue politics and solve the world’s problems, which my parents didn’t spend time doing. And I was privileged to be invited with my male friend and that family was the Mack family. And my girlfriend in high school, her family was the [Rauh] family, and I was invited to tag into some of those evenings. And I liked it. I decided that when I grow up, that might be a nice way to do things. A fun way to live life. A stimulating and rewarding way to live life. Watching how Byron Waksman and James Watson and Norman Salzman and Cornfeld did research, it’s like the guild system. There’s no books written about how to be a researcher. You learn how to be a researcher watching people be successful and incorporating their approach into you. Literally. Empathizing and saying this is the way I want to do things, consciously. This isn’t talked about a lot. And then Braunwald in terms of administration, and then my own father. I remember when I was a little kid going down to his business and it was in downtown Cincinnati and most of the people working for him were stockboys, secretaries, clerks. They were of all races. He treated them with incredible respect. He would introduce me to his secretary, and you could tell she wasn’t a particularly stimulating person, but you could tell he was proud to introduce his son to her and he was proud to introduce her to his son, and we’d go out to people working stacking cases of belts and suspenders in the stockroom area and he had a very – he was a southern person. He grew up in Baton Rouge. And I remember when we had his funeral – we had his funeral and my uncle, the rabbi, described my dad as a real old fashioned southern gentleman. That hit a strong note. I hadn’t thought of him as a southerner. Now that I’ve lived in the south I understand what my uncle was talking about. But he was a southern gentleman. I think I learned from him my attitude toward people. I told you my uncle was a role model. The philosopher. The reader. The thinking of the key issues in life from a rational point of view. Building in faith with a rational reason for why you do what you do. So I think you build your personality. END OF AUDIO FILE ONE
Recommended Citation
Mendelsohn, John MD, "Chapter 03: On Faculty at UCSD: Leadership, Mentoring, and a Philosophy of Character" (2005). Interview Chapters. 1445.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1445
Conditions Governing Access
Open
