Chapter 09: Strengthening Biomedical Editing Nationwide and Within MD Anderson
Files
Description
In this Chapter, first briefly notes his involvement with the Southwest Chapter of the American Medical Writer’s Association and the Council of Biology Editors (with a 22-year membership). He then explains that he had his biggest impact while he served on the Board of Editors in the Life Sciences and in the late 80s worked on the Editorial Certification Examination Development Committee. He describes the examination he helped create to certify competence for editors of biomedical articles and explains the significance of certification. He notes that the Department of Scientific Publications at MD Anderson uses its own battery of tests to evaluate editors’ abilities for abstract reasoning, grammar, and other skills and talents.
Next, Mr. Pagel talks about his Department’s blog, “The Write Stuff,” and two significant projects: his role on the Historical Resources Center Steering Committee, and the development of panel discussions for the Department of Scientific Publications. To begin the discussion of the Steering Committee, he notes that Scientific Publications wrote The First Twenty Years, the first history of MD Anderson. Because of this association with the institution’s history, Mr. Pagel was asked to be part of the Steering Committee when the Historical Resources Center was formed and set as its first goal the publication of an updated institutional history. Mr. Pagel wanted the perspective to be broader than the first book, situating MD Anderson and cancer research in a larger context of other cancer institutions and the history of cancer research. Though not alone in holding this view, he says he had something to do with articulating it for the benefit of the Steering Committee. He describes how James Olsen was selected to be the author and notes other Steering Committee activities.
Identifier
PagelW_02_20120810_C09
Publication Date
8-10-2012
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Walter Pagel, ELS (D), Oral History Interview, August 10, 2012
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - ContributionsBuilding/Transforming the Institution The Administrator The Educator Activities Outside Institution Career and Accomplishments Institutional Processes
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 Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s neat. A couple of other things I wanted to ask you about here. In 1988 through ’90 you were on the Board of Directors of the American Medical Writers Association, and it looks like you have a continuing role with them.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I do not.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay. But it endured for a little bit.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
A little bit. I think it’s the local chapter, frankly.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, okay. I thought there were two—I thought I read that there were two—but you correct me. What was your role and what was the organization?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
The local chapter of the American Medical Writers Association—I say local. It’s the southwest chapter and covers parts of New Mexico and Texas, and I simply was a member of the board. I was not a big-time officer. The place that I had the greatest impact on a national organization was in the Board of Editors in the Life Sciences. It said on that timeline that I was one of the charter members of the group, and in fact, what it doesn’t say on the timeline was that I was the Chairman of the Certification Examination Development Committee.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What does that mean?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
That means I got a bunch of people together. We learned how to write test questions that were fair and valid and correct, and we wrote 200 test questions and tested them with real people doing real work and narrowed them down to 150, and now there’s an exam given four to six times a year all over the world to give editors the opportunity to show that they have the fundamental skills necessary to edit biomedical or scientific manuscripts.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Can you give me the name of that—it’s the Certification Development—what was the name of the committee that you were on?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Certification Examination Development Committee.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Thank you.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I suppose you should put the editor in front of that—editorial or something like that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And when was that?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
That happened—it started happening in the late ‘80s. I was invited to join the first committee that was developing a test for an organization called the Council of Biology Editors. I was told that if I would work with them one or two years I would have discharged my obligation and it’s now—I think it’s twenty-two years later I have finally ended my last position of that of Appeals Secretary for the Board of Editors in the Life Sciences.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Why did you feel it was so important to get involved with those initiatives?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
You will laugh perhaps, but I felt that I could do it and therefore I should. Not because I thought the world was dying to have a certification examination, but there was a group of people—editors who thought, and I had thought this too—that there were many, many people claiming to be editors who didn’t know what they were doing. And there were many people who were hiring editors who didn’t know what editors should be doing or should know or anything like that. And though I didn’t feel some altruistic need to help editors prove they knew what they were doing or help people hiring them to know who they were hiring, I felt an obligation to these people who felt an obligation, and that obligation arose simply because I felt I could do it.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
But it sounds like it made a big impact.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I think it did.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How does it work now? An individual takes this test, and they get a certification from the Board of Editors of the Life Sciences?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Right.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay. And so that—it’s not a necessary thing but it’s certainly something that puts you—it makes you head of the pack.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Exactly.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How many editors in the US do you think take that test? Or how many individuals who are interested in editorial jobs take that test?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I’m trying to remember because there are statistics and I’m thinking something like 200 a year. And I believe we already have some very large number—close to 1,000—who are certified. It seems large. Maybe it’s not. It doesn’t seem large, but that’s—these are biomedical or science editors. There are organizations that want you to be certified in order for you to be hired. And then of course there are other people who are more interested in you if you are certified.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I imagine it may make a difference in salary and all kinds of things.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I don’t know. Never our intention and I don’t know. This organization—the Department of Scientific Publications doesn’t really need the certification to determine whether a person should join our staff because we have our own sets of tests.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Interesting. What sorts of tests are they?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
One is grammar—a pretty sophisticated grammar test. We’re just looking to see if somebody knows something, and it’s surprising the number of people who call themselves editors who don’t know what we want them to know. And then there are a series of tests of things like abstract reasoning and—I don’t remember what the others are because I didn’t really do them, invent them, or work with organization and development here at HR to develop them, and really it’s not so much develop them as select which ones and set the cut scores based on experience with the staff at the time we developed them.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
One thing we didn’t talk about with The Write Stuff—or actually, no we haven’t talked about that. I caught the mistake and—I hadn’t asked you yet about that online newsletter.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
The Write Stuff?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
The Write Stuff. Yeah. And I wanted—this kind of goes back to the online publishing as I understand is that it was part of the training program?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Yes.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Could you tell me a little bit about that?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
The original idea was that we would help a community of writers stay together. It really hasn’t worked out that way so much as we’ve just tried to keep the people who have taken our courses up-to-date on developments, or give them new ways of looking at writing, or give them new tips that they might use, and so on. I think it’s once a quarter, so the people here in the department come up with the ideas and then write—research and write the articles. And they’re short. But I think they’re good. They’re well-written, and they got—it’s sent to graduates mainly and a few other people that know about it.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
But it was originally you said to try to sustain a community of writers? That’s always such a tricky thing to do.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
They have so much else to do they don’t have time to be in a community of writers. They are already in the community of science.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Right. Yeah.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
They don’t have time for another community.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. It’s too bad though because having a community of writers can really be helpful in the whole process.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Well, maybe if we worked harder maybe it would come to pass.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
No, I wasn’t saying if—it’s just a reality of people’s time, you know. It is, but I know being a writer myself, it’s really nice to have that—have sounding boards, but it’s just how many hours in the day do you have to sit at the computer and sustain those connections? One of the reasons that we know each other outside of this interview is because you sit on the Historical Resources Center’s steering committee, and I wanted to ask you about that. I also wanted to ask a broader question related to—I’m sure you’ve sat on many other committees that I don’t know about, and so I have a couple of questions. One is how you got involved with the steering committee, but then the other question is—other initiatives that you’ve taken part in that maybe aren’t directly related to Scientific Publications but how important you feel it is that Scientific Publications is represented on a variety of initiatives that have been—that are undertaken at the institution. So that’s sort of the big area in which I want the question to move. So maybe first let’s start with how you got connected up with the Historical Resources Center and why you felt that was important and important for Scientific Publications to be a part of.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
There are so many assumptions in what you say that are—
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay. Slap my hand.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
No, it’s okay. It’d be the assumptions that anybody would have, which is that there was some purpose, there was some guiding light behind all of this and there usually wasn’t. It was—here’s a circumstance, somebody invited me. If I think I can do something, I’ll do it. But in this particular instance, this department before my time—ten years before my time, fifteen years before my time—wrote The First Twenty Years, which is the first history of MD Anderson. It was interesting. It was just anecdotal. It was a collection for the most part—a huge collection of interesting anecdotes that people who love MD Anderson would want to read. There was to be another history and this department—the leaders of this department who wished to include me at that time—were involved in trying to shepherd that history by getting various departments in the institution to write their own histories. That was a miserable failure. Many departments didn’t want to write them. None of them was—not one history matched anything about another department’s history. It was why—what kind of thing is going to result from this? The First Twenty Years has a consistent editorial voice. It may not be great public history, but it was consistent. This one would have been pure misery to try to shape into a coherent piece. People kept taking it up and trying to fix it and so on, and sometimes they were people in this department and sometimes not. Anyway, the point is the department became associated with the history, and so when it was decided finally that we really would have a real history I was the natural person to ask to be a member of the committee. Not me personally but the Director of Scientific Publications.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What input did you feel you could and did make to shaping the—and that resulted of course in James Olson’s book, Making Cancer History—and what was the particular impact that you felt you brought to the table?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I think we kind of had like minds—the first members of that committee, especially Steve Tomasovic [Oral History Interview], Steve Stuyck [Oral History Interview],and me, and Mary Jane [Schier]—which was that the history should not be another sort of inward-looking history like The First Twenty Years was—of kind of taking MD Anderson in isolation from the world and talking about it; that it should be—that it should have a context that was related to cancer, to medicine, to Texas, to the United States. It shouldn’t interact with the history of those regions. It should be a real history. It should put it in its place in the world, and I had something to do with articulating that and helping make sure—I think that—I don’t—I think it might have gone—probably would have gone the same way had I never been there, but sometimes I was able to say it in a way that helped others see it in the same way I was. The history itself—there are other histories in this medical center of various institutions that are miserable little pieces of puff. If you read—if you work in those institutions and you don’t think, right—you think they’re great. If you don’t work in them and you read them you think, ‘who cares?’ And we didn’t want a book that said, ‘but who cares.’ And so I think I’m pretty attuned to what a book and its—how a book and its audience should match and so we had a couple of people—probably you’ve seen them. I think they—a couple of people who got the—who appeared to get the first contract but they were public historians of the most puffery kind. They had credentials, but their products were just nothing but laudatory junk, and we wanted a couple of awards—maybe not all awards but a couple of awards to show, to make it seem real not fake; not something you just put in a time capsule and store away for people 100 years from now to think that you were a wonderful place—but to have historians pick up the book and so on and so forth. So we—not only I but Steve Stuyck and Tomasovic and Mary Jane—thought that those first couple of people were just not going to produce the book we wanted. Even though we came this close to hiring them, we were so grateful that we didn’t. And the good fortune—we didn’t know how because we booked a lot of—we sent out an RFA, we got a few applications. We picked what we thought was the best one. We were extremely disappointed that the best one wasn’t any better than it was. Olson did not submit an application, but Steve Stuyck remembered him from the past. I don’t know just how he remembered him; I just know he did—that he was a historian, that he had been treated at MD Anderson, that he worked with Sam Houston [State], and so Steve made a connection with him and basically persuaded him to be the historian for the group.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, in between publication of Making Cancer History and kind of the re-start of the oral history project—your formal re-start of the Oral History Project a year ago—what did the Historical Resources Center’s steering committee do during that time? What projects did you work on?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I’m not sure we had any except to try to make sure that the oldest faculty got talked to before they died.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. Well, which is always a key thing with an oral history. Absolutely. Yeah. What are—when you began talking about really re-starting the Oral History Project, what were your—and what are—your particular hopes for it? What do you want the—which purpose do you want it to serve?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
There you go again—thinking I have a purpose.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
You don’t have hopes for it?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Well, I hope it’s done well. I hope the people access it. I hope the people learn things about MD Anderson. I hope they learn about the individuals who made up this place who are really what made it great. The individuals were more important to the institution in its early years than they are now. The institution has a certain—a momentum all its own that is less able to be shifted by individuals than it would before. We were—I don’t know how that’s an answer to your question, but to what did I think the purpose of the Oral History Project is—but even though that’s the case, I think people still want to know about the movers and shakers of an institution, and they want to hear what they have to say maybe twenty years from now. I doubt that the early pioneers at this place ever thought about others reading their histories twenty years in the future. They just thought about the problems they had in the face of that. And so we could say that even today when someone like me doesn’t see the purpose personally—they don’t actually see why anyone would want to know what Scientific Publications did other than the people who are working with them now—that could very well be different twenty years from now, and who’s to say? And so if it’s not here you can’t look at it. And if it is here—or listen to it—and if it is, you can.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, and I think I understand when you say that the individuals may have been more important in the past when MD Anderson was smaller because it’s almost as if the ripple effect around each other individual is easier to see. Today, when the institution is so huge, it’s more difficult. We talked about this last time during the session, and pretty much everybody that I’ve talked to for the project who’s been here for any length of time has talked about how interactions are less face-to-face, there’s more virtual—there’s just a sense that individuals have less network. Almost with an oral history you could kind of turn it around and say it’s almost as if capturing the individual voices in those situations is even more important because everybody I’ve spoken to who knows R. Lee Clark speaks at length about him whereas individuals who’ve come in later—they may have a smaller, more specialized field of influence, and it’s even more important to capture who they are and what their passion is and what their stories are and what drove them and—
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Good point. Yeah, good point.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
It’s a very neat process.
Recommended Citation
Pagel, Walter ELS and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 09: Strengthening Biomedical Editing Nationwide and Within MD Anderson" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1278.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1278
Conditions Governing Access
Open
