Chapter 12: Paying Attention: A Professional and Personal Habit
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Description
In this Chapter, Mr. Pagel first talks about receiving the John P. McGovern Award for Excellence in Biomedical Communication in 2001. He then looks ahead to activities he will take up after retiring at the end of August 2012. He likes to cook and tend orchids and he also writes, he notes. He is a good amateur photographer and may volunteer for the Houston Public Library’s new photography project. He lists some of the authors he respects (e.g. Ernest Hemmingway and Vladimir Nabokov). Observing his own character he says, “I notice that there are people who don’t notice anything,” whereas he feels his is attuned to what’s going on around him. This, he says, is the reason he likes to cook, enjoy wine, and keep orchids. He mentions that he recently received a call from Chapin Rodriguez, Director of Scientific Training at the Association for Multimedia Education (UMNA) in China, who asked him, “How do you do this?” Mr. Pagel says, “What I do is fairly simple, but moderately unusual: I ask questions and pay attention to the answers.”
Identifier
PagelW_02_20120810_C12
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 - Post-Retirement Activities Portraits Discovery, Creativity and Innovation Faith, Values, Beliefs Activities Outside Institution Career and Accomplishments Post Retirement Activities Professional Values, Ethics, Purpose Character, Values, Beliefs, Talents Personal Background Professional Practice
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:
Will you tell me about getting the John P. McGovern Award for excellence in biomedical communication? That was in 2001?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I was very pleased to get it, of course. I thought I gave a great talk, if I do say so myself. I dealt with the issues that I care about, and I wanted others to think about them in the same way. I never once thought that I could share the podium with some of the other winners like Jane Brody or Oliver Sacks, but I didn’t think that I didn’t deserve it. I just think it meant that there are only so many excellent biomedical communicators in the world, and sometimes you don’t have to be the best one to get an award.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
But the talk that you gave for that particular—for that event really—that turned into your article about how to basically create a narrative in a scientific article, and it seemed to me when I read it that it really expressed all of your basic values about what good scientific writing is. It was a unique opportunity to voice those ideas.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I worked pretty hard on it. Maybe I didn’t even have all those ideas before I wrote it. I don’t know. I don’t remember any more. I just know what I concluded there, and what I concluded in that article I feel even more strongly about today, which is that people need to tell what happened. If they want other people to care about science they need to tell what happened not pretend that nothing but what you expected to happen happened in the exact order you expected it to happen in, because that’s not interesting. That’s basically it.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
It loses a sense of the adventure that everybody knows is there.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Or hope is there at least. God, why would I want to be in science if that’s all you do is execute some rote thing that’s written down in a book somewhere? I can cook at home.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s a good one. That’s a good one. Is there anything else that you’d like to—or maybe I should ask you— Well, you already told me you had absolutely no plans for retirement. Are you going to modify that?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Well, when I said I have no plans I mean that I have no plans to change. I have plans to do things that I have been doing for decades but have had less and less opportunity to do and still would love to do them. I doubt that I’ll do anything that I haven’t already done at least something of and enjoyed unless it’s to volunteer somewhere. Brian wants me to volunteer at the Houston Public Library for their archive—photo archive project.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
You’re interested in photography?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Very much, yes.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Are you a photographer?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
Of sorts. Good enough. I can compose an interesting photo fairly easily. I learned from one of the well-known photographers in Houston how to do that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I had occasion to go into the new digital media center at the public library—central—the central branch, and it’s really impressive.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
That’s where we’re talking about. They’re looking for people who will help them—probably do scutwork, but that’s okay—regarding their photo archives and the history of Houston.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What else do you plan to do that you’ve done a little bit of before?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I’ve done a lot of orchid tending, but I’ll do more at home. I’ll do more landscaping because it’s hard work, but I’ll keep the landscape up better with the help of people who will do the work for me. Cook more. I tend not to cook so much during the week.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What’s your specialty?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I don’t have one. I just like to cook. I don’t do Oriental food, and I don’t do Mexican food. Fran does that. I’ll do almost anything else. Reading. I think I probably read enough, but I may read more.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Is there a particular book that’s had a real impact on you? Or author?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I don’t know. I’ve just read—oddly, I just finished The Sun Also Rises again, and when I finished it I had this very emotional reaction to it. I understood better what Hemingway did than when I first read it, which was in high school. But I did have a teacher who had—who was from Michigan who had interviewed Hemingway and knew him and knew about his books and what they meant.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What was that reaction about do you think?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I don’t know. Like I had just read a treasure of some kind. I think people don’t appreciate Hemingway any more or not the way they used to. I don’t completely understand why I had that reaction. It could have been just fond memory from when I read it the first time, but I didn’t remember that much of it. That was fifty years ago. Anyway, I don’t know who’s affected me the most among readers, writers, but he’s one of course. And I admire Vladimir Nabokov for an amazing ability to write—though he said he edits every word some dozens of times—every word he ever wrote, so I guess you can understand that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Anything else outside you feel—anything you feel has been a real influence on you—kind of shaped your thinking or—?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
No. I’ve been lucky in a funny way which is that I’ve noticed that there are people who don’t notice anything much. They live in their brains. They barely have ears. They barely have eyes. They barely have a nose and a tongue. And I’ve never had that problem. For them it’s not a problem, okay. But to me, I just can’t imagine not noticing what the heck is going on in the world. When you walk down the street don’t you notice that there’s a cicada on the curb? No. There was a cicada back there, really? What’s a cicada? What’s my point here? I don’t know. Part of why I like orchids, part of why I like to cook—I have a wine cellar. I like wine. Cellar would be the wrong word. We don’t have any cellars in Houston, but wine closet. I write some. It will be interesting to see whether—now that I don’t have an excuse—whether I can write when I’m not just inspired to write. When I’m inspired to write it comes fairly easily. I’m not saying it’s great, but it comes fairly easily. Can I write if I say today I’m going to write? I don’t know. We’ll see. I can write a business letter any time you ask me to. It’ll be a great business letter. You tell me what your purpose is; I will write you a letter that works. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Do you write fiction or non-fiction?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I don’t write either one. I write. I try to get down into words what I see and smell and feel.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Creative non-fiction.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I guess so, yeah. And not very long. Short pieces.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Is there anything else that you’d like to add?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
I don’t think so. Except for one thing, because this has suddenly gotten large importance for me. I recently—like in three or four days ago—was called by a man named Chapin Rodríguez, who is a scientist who has decided that he wants to affect many underserved—if you want—universities and help their people learn to write better all over the world—China, Spain, Yugoslavia—and he wanted to hear about the program here. I talked about it and told him some things, and he asked me at one point in there, “How do you do this?” and I took that to be a question of me. Although now that I say that out loud I’m thinking it might have been how does one do this, but I took it as how do I do this, and my answer was I don’t know how I do this. Something needs to be done and I do it. But I realized in thinking about it more—or think I realized in thinking about it more—that what I do is fairly simple but moderately unusual. I pay attention. I ask questions and I listen to the answers. So if that was on my tombstone I would be satisfied. I used to want “Here lies Walter Pagel. He never went to AstroWorld,” but that seems pretty trivial now. I think this is much better.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I think it is. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
No. That’s it.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Thank you very much for your time.
Walter Pagel, ELS (D):
You’re welcome. I enjoyed it.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I did, too. It is 3:55 and I’m turning off the recorder. (End of Audio Session 2)
Recommended Citation
Pagel, Walter ELS and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 12: Paying Attention: A Professional and Personal Habit" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1281.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1281
Conditions Governing Access
Open
