Chapter 11: Moving the Department of Surgical Oncology into National Prominence
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Description
Dr. Pollock describes how he led the Department to “bring visibility to this group of young people” who were doing stellar work. In an anecdote, he describes how the Department worked together to “colonize” the Society of Surgical Oncology conference. By helping one another with abstracts and how experiments were conceptualized, MD Anderson’s Department of Surgical Oncology went from having 3 papers accepted per conference, to 27 papers, wresting control from Sloan Kettering researchers and dominating the podium at this major event in the field for 2-3 years. This raised the Department’s national profile and demonstrated its commitment to attracting fellows who could compete for academic positions.
Dr. Pollock points out that during his fifteen years as Chair, 85-90% of the Departments fellows have entered academic positions, with 20% holding positions as department chairs or sections chiefs. This is evidence that the department has had a real impact on academic surgery, and he points out the concurrent commitment to clinical care as well.
Identifier
PollokRE_02_20121010-C11
Publication Date
10-10-2012
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Raphael Pollock, MD, Oral History Interview, October 10, 2012
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - Building the InstitutionThe Administrator The MD Anderson Brand, Reputation Collaborations Obstacles, Challenges MD Anderson Past MD Anderson Impact Building/Transforming the Institution Growth and/or Change MD Anderson Culture
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:
Well, tell me more about those first few years and some things that you did to—projects you initiated or you undertook to get the department on track.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Well, one of the things that I thought would be very important was to figure out what are the fast tracks to bring visibility to this group of relatively young people. So the major academic surgical oncology organization is called the Society of Surgical Oncology, and at that time, their annual meeting was limited to forty-two podium paper presentations, and that was kind of carved in stone. The abstracts that were judged and ranked in order for someone to get onto the podium were viewed in a blinded fashion, which was a real advantage. So I brought the department together, and I said, “Listen, let’s work on colonizing this meeting, and let’s pick that as our target.” People were writing abstracts and sending them to meetings, but they were hither and yon. It was not a cohesive, coherent effort. I said, “Let’s make a commitment to each other that we’re going to try to bring our very best work to this Society of Surgical Oncology meeting and we’ll help each other with the abstract writing processes and we’ll see if that strategy can bring us more visibility.” Because, up to that point, it was very sporadic. There were two or maybe three of the papers from Anderson. The vast majority were from Sloan-Kettering. The Society of Surgical Oncology was originally the James Ewing Society. It was set up as the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital Alumni Club. It was only later that other groups were let into it. So we did that. And the abstract deadlines were known way in advance, and we met as a department and went through one of the abstracts we were going to put together, and then we worked to put these together as a group. So people gave very, very selflessly. We stayed down here until 11:00, 12:00, 1:00, 2:00 in the morning. There were people who were taking the abstracts down to the downtown post office just before the deadline and sending them out FedEx. We bought pizzas for everyone. People were moving from one office to the others. People who were very good at statistics were crunching the numbers. These abstracts, they give you a teeny-tiny box, so it’s almost like writing a Japanese Haiku poem. There were others who were very, very good at fitting ideas into very small spaces, others who were very good at generating hypotheses and would be critical. You say this, but that’s just descriptive; it’s not a real hypothesis. But we worked together as a unit.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So you worked on the individual abstracts, and then did you put them together as a group so they were offering a kind of buffet, if you will?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Everyone saw everyone’s abstract, so it was like a huge internal peer review mechanism. So we went from three to twenty-seven of the podium presentations in two years. And we so dominated that meeting for two to three years that they finally said, “We can no longer review the abstracts blinded.” But by then we’d made the reputation that Anderson was a very, very strong academic program.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
+ And we made the commitment that we were going to preferentially accept into our fellowship people who wanted academic training, including people who wanted extra time in the laboratory. And we had a T32 training grant from the NCI. Charles Balch had gotten it and then passed it on to me, and that paid for the extra time that people needed in their fellowship, otherwise there was no way to salary support people. And we made it very, very clear that while we were very egalitarian at the intake valve, we would not exclusively take people who trained in academic residencies. At the end of the time at MD Anderson was someone who was able to compete for an academic job. And so we took people from community hospitals, but community hospitals where, in spite of the very limited resources, they had gone and reviewed the entire colon cancer experience and reported at the Oklahoma State Surgery Society. While that has a somewhat different cache than going to a national academic surgery meeting that someone might have had they trained at the University of Chicago or Mass General, we felt that, within the context of what was available, that showed a commitment to academics. So one of the things that we decided as a group was if you did not have any research experience during your residency, our fellowship was a mandatory three-year training program, at a time when Sloan-Kettering’s was two years. You could take a two-year track only if you’d had a significant research experience. And that was at a time when academic jobs were preferentially going to people who had laboratory research credentials. So during the fifteen years during which I served as chair, approximately eighty-five percent of our fellows went into full-time academic positions, and of that group of fellows that trained—slightly more than 100—about twenty percent are now either department chairs or section chiefs of their respective institutions. So working together as a group here—this young faculty, in the service of that vision—we had a tremendous impact on academic surgery, let alone surgical oncology specifically. That became a very strong focal point—this absolute commitment to quality clinical care. One of the criteria to come on the faculty if we recruited you—we were very up front—this person has to be someone that you’d be willing to have operate on any family member of yours if your family member had that specific disease. That was the most transparent way that I could ensure that people agreed about the quality standard and that the people that we were bringing in would meet that standard. And most of that is not rocket science. It’s actually fairly straightforward. It was just, I think, having the opportunity to articulate that when people were uncertain about how we actually go about doing this. I didn’t know. Hell, we were just sort of flying by the seat of our pants, but I figured, geez, what’s the strongest academic outlet? It’s the SSO. Well, what do we have to do to colonize it? And that’s what we did. How do we make sure that the people that we bring into our training program are really interested in academics? Well, by gosh, if they’re willing to spend another whole year in a lab, that’s pretty good prima facie evidence. How do we make certain that our faculty is absolute top-flight clinicians first before anything else? If you’ll let a family member be operated on by them, that’s pretty transparent. And we were able to agree on these as our basic modus operandi. These were the principles by which we lived professionally, and I think that it really helped forge a very, very strong unit that to this day I think is recognized as the strongest surgical oncology group in the world. Now, that may be a little bit of an overstatement, but I’d put our people up against anyone’s—any other unit—and I’d certainly put our track record of— I don’t know of any other academic fellowship in medicine in which eighty-five to ninety percent of the individuals are now currently in academic positions. Certainly in surgery it doesn’t exist.
Recommended Citation
Pollock, Raphael E. MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 11: Moving the Department of Surgical Oncology into National Prominence" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1323.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1323
Conditions Governing Access
Open
